Tiya Miles

Tiya Miles is an award-winning historian, professor, and author whose work examines the intersections of Native American and African American history. She holds the Michael Garvey Professorship of History at Harvard University and has been recognized as a MacArthur Fellow. Her scholarship brings rigorous archival research together with narrative skill to illuminate histories that have been overlooked or suppressed in the dominant accounts of American life.

Miles earned her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and has held faculty positions at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Santa Cruz, before joining Harvard. Her books include Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2005), The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (2010), and The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (2017), which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Her 2021 book All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family’s Keepsake traces the history of a cotton seed sack that was passed from an enslaved mother to her nine-year-old daughter at a slave auction in South Carolina around 1850, eventually becoming an embroidered family relic discovered and displayed by the Smithsonian. The book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2021, making Miles one of a very small number of authors to win the prize twice. It is widely regarded as one of the finest works of American historical nonfiction of its decade.

Miles’s work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, among others. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and continues to research and teach at the intersection of race, gender, and Indigenous history in the United States.