Dr. Kendra Taira Field

Kendra Taira Field is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. Field’s first book, Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2018), traced her own ancestors’ migratory lives in the Black towns of Indian Territory and Oklahoma. Her current book project, The Stories We Tell, is a history of African American genealogy from the Middle Passage to the present. Field served as Assistant Editor to David Levering Lewis’ W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (Henry Holt, 2009), and is co-founder of the African American Trail Project and project historian for the Du Bois Freedom Center. Field has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, and Harvard University's Charles Warren Center in American History. She is the recipient of the Western Writers of America's, 2017 Spur Award for Best Western Short Nonfiction, the 2016 Boahen-Wilks Prize, and the OAH's Huggins-Quarles Award. Field has advised and appeared in historical documentaries including Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" (2013), "Roots: A History Revealed" (2016), and “Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre” (2021). 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, organizing, and the non-profit sector in Boston and New York.