Chief Historian
Dr. Kendra Taira Field is the Gerald R. Gill Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Public History at Tufts University. A citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Field is the author of Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War (Yale, 2018). which traced her own ancestors’ post-emancipation lives in Indian Territory and Oklahoma. Field’s current book project, The Stories We Tell (W.W. Norton, 2027), is a history of African American genealogy and storytelling from the Middle Passage to the present, and winner of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. As a public historian, Field co-founded and directs the Du Bois Forum, a retreat for writers, scholars, and artists; served as project historian for the Du Bois Freedom Center; and co-curated the inaugural exhibition (2023) of the National Women's History Museum.
Field previously abridged David Levering Lewis' Pulitzer Prize winning biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, and her scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of African American History, Southern Cultures, and the American Historical Review. Her recent AHR article, "The Privilege of Family History," explores the history of African American engagement with family history and genealogy in slavery and freedom.
Field has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, and Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center in American History. An elected member of the Society of American Historians, she is the recipient of the 2025-26 Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University; the Western Writers of America’s 2017 Spur Award for Best Western Short Nonfiction; the 2016 Boahen-Wilks Prize; and the 2022 NAACP W. E. B. Du Bois Award. Field has advised and appeared in numerous documentaries and television programs including Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" (2013), "Tulsa Burning" (2021), and HBO Max’s six-episode saga, Breaking New Ground (2024); and she co-produced the documentary feature, Night Fight, which premiered at South by Southwest in 2025. Field received her Ph.D. in American History from New York University. She also holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a B.A. from Williams College. Before entering the academy, she worked in education and the non-profit sector in Boston and New York.
You can contact Dr. Field at 10mn@americanancestors.org.