Please join us for a talk hosted by the Department of African and African American Studies (DAAAS). Professor Tiya Miles will give a talk, titled, “Species Insurance”: Black Women, Environmental Storytelling, and Survival.

Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She 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 offers courses on slavery and public history, women’s history and literature, interrelated Black and Indigenous histories, and environmental humanities. She has become increasingly focused on ecological questions, environmental storytelling, and ways of articulating and enlivening African American environmental consciousness. Her forthcoming book, Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, explores these themes as part of the W. W. Norton “Norton Shorts” book series (fall 2023).

Prof. Tiya Miles 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. She taught on the faculty of the University of Michigan for sixteen years, where she served as Chair of the Department of Afro American & African Studies, Director of the Native American Studies Program, and founding director of ECO Girls (Environmental & Cultural Opportunities for Girls in Urban Southeast Michigan).

This talk will take place on Monday, February 5 from 4.00-5.30pm in the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) Conference Room in Building 360. 

This talk is part of the Black Studies of the Arts (Open Rank) Faculty Search. Each event in the series features a 50-minute talk followed by 30 minutes of discussion.