Tiya Miles

Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History, Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.

Miles is a public historian, academic historian, and creative writer whose work primarily explores the intersections of African American, Native American, and women’s histories in the context of place. Her temporal and geographical zones of greatest interest include the nineteenth-century U.S. South, Midwest, and West.

Miles is the author of seven books. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (2021), won eleven prizes, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Her other books include The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Bondage and Freedom in the City of the Straits (2017); The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (2010); Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era (2015), and a work of historical fiction, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts (2015; 2023).

She has written scholarly articles and essays explore nineteenth-century women’s struggles against injustice, conjoined Black and Native histories & literatures, public histories of plantations, and environmental histories and challenges.  

Miles has served as a consultant for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, and the Chief Vann House State Historic Site in Georgia. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award” Fellowship and her work has also been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  

She holds an AB in Afro-American Studies from Harvard University, an MA in Women’s Studies from Emory University, and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. Previously, she was on the faculty of the University of Michigan for sixteen years, where she served as Chair of the Department of Afroamerican & African Studies, and Director of the Native American Studies Program