Faculty

Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy

Dr. Kendra Taira Field is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. Field is the author of Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War (Yale, 2018). Her current book project, The Stories We Tell (W.W. Norton) is a history of African American genealogy and storytelling from the Middle Passage to the present. Field abridged David Levering Lewis’ W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (Henry Holt, 2009), 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.

As a public historian, Field co-founded the African American Trail Project and the Du Bois Forum, a retreat for writers, scholars, and artists of color; served as project historian for the Du Bois Freedom Center; co-curated “We Who Believe In Freedom: Black Feminist DC,” the inaugural exhibition (2023) of the National Women’s History Museum; and serves as chief historian for the 10 Million Names Project.

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. 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 2022 NAACP W.E.B. Du Bois Award. With the support of the Mellon Foundation, Field convened a 2019-2020 Mellon Sawyer Seminar on the politics of kinship, “Defamiliarizing the Family: Genealogy and Kinship as Critical Method.” 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 Masters 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.

Kerri Greenidge is Mellon Associate Professor in History, and in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she also co-directs the African American Trail Project and Tufts’ Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies Project. Greenidge is the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (2019). The book received the Mark Lynton Prize in History, the Massachusetts Book Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Award, the Sperber Award from Fordham University, and the Peter J. Gomes Book Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society. Her most recent book, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family (2022) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the J. Anthony Lukas Award. The Grimkes was a finalist for the 2023 MAAH Stone Book Award, a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Award from the Schomburg Library, and the recipient of the 2023 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association. As a public historian, Greenidge serves on the historians’ council for 10 Million Names, and as historical advisor for the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket. Her writings have appeared in the New York Times, Massachusetts Historical Review, the Radical History Review, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Guardian.