Kendra Taira Field

2025-2026

Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow

Dr. Kendra Taira Field is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Public History at Tufts University. 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’ lives in slavery and freedom. 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, and winner of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. Field abridged David Levering Lewis' W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (Henry Holt, 2009). Field has been awarded numerous fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, and Harvard University's Charles Warren Center in American History.

As a public historian, Field co-founded the Du Bois Forum, a retreat for writers, scholars, and artists, and serves as chief historian for the 10 Million Names Project. Field served as project historian for the Du Bois Freedom Center, the first museum in North America dedicated to the life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois; and co-curated "We Who Believe In Freedom: Black Feminist DC," the inaugural exhibition of the National Women's History Museum. 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).

Most recently, Field joined Robert Hartwell on screen throughout the new six-episode streaming saga, “Breaking New Ground,” now live on HBO Max. Before entering the academy, she worked in education, organizing, and the non-profit sector in Boston and New York.

Fellowship Project

The Stories We Tell traces the history of African American genealogy and family storytelling from the Middle Passage to the present. It is about the painstaking efforts of generations of African Americans to access and share their familial pasts; how these efforts were shaped by the history of slavery, emancipation, segregation, and civil rights struggle; and how these, in turn, shaped American history. The book documents where millions of African descent went—aesthetically, creatively, and when others were not listening—to make meaning of our familial past.