Lecture by Historian Tiya Miles Will Explore the Early Life of Harriet Tubman
Tiya Miles
Source: amherst.edu
Tiya Miles, the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, will reconstruct the early life of abolitionist Harriet Tubman, considering how relationships, religious faith, and environmental knowledge prepared her for a lifetime of bold activism and creative community building. The lecture, will conclude with lessons that we can draw from Tubman’s life story as we face significant societal challenges today. Miles will lecture on Tuesday April 15 at 5 p.m. in the Cole Assembly Room of Converse Hall at Amherst College.
Miles is the author of eight books, including four prize-winning histories about race and slavery in the American past. Her latest work is the biography Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Her 2021 National Book Award winner, All That She Carried:The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller that won eleven historical and literary prizes, including the Cundill History Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. All That She Carried was named A Best Book of the Year by The New York Times,The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, The Atlantic, Time, and more. Her other nonfiction works include Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, The Dawn of Detroit, Tales from the Haunted South, The House on Diamond Hill, and Ties That Bind. Miles publishes essays and reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and other media outlets, and she is the author of the time-bridge novel, The Cherokee Rose, a ghost story set in the plantation South. She has consulted with colleagues at historic sites and museums on representations of slavery, African American material culture, and the Black-Indigenous intertwined past, including, most recently, the Fabric of a Nation quilt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been supported by a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation.