Tiya Miles

Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. 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 Black environmental consciousness. Her latest books, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (Penguin 2024) and Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation (W.W. Norton 2023), explore these themes. 

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 (2011-2016), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2024-2025), and a Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture (2007). Her work has also been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is currently working on a cultural history featuring Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Beecher Stowe.