On May 19, 2021 Tiya Miles gave a talk about her forthcoming book for the annual Stephanie M.H. Camp Memorial Lecture Series in Race & Gender. This event was sponsored by the UW Department of History and the UW Libraries. Tiya Miles' talk was titled "A Tattered Dress”: Materiality and Memory in the Lives of Enslaved Women and highlighted artifacts of Black women’s material culture to consider ways that objects can help us recover experiential aspects of the gendered Black past. Dr. Miles unpacked Ashley’s Sack, the gift of an enslaved mother to her daughter in antebellum Charleston, in an effort to gain special access to Black women’s cultures of care and strategies of memory keeping. By applying the trailblazing findings of the historian Stephanie M.H. Camp, this talk explored the meanings of adornment, dignity, survival, and love.
Tiya Miles is a Professor of History and the Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University. Miles is the author of five books, including three prize-winning works in the history of American slavery: Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story, and The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits. Miles has translated her research into historical fiction, recounted her travels to "haunted" historic sites of the South in a published lecture series, and written widely on history and memory, Black culture, women’s history, and Black and Indigenous interrelated experience. Her current project, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake, is forthcoming from Random House. Miles is a past MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award” and National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award recipient.
The Stephanie M.H. Camp Lecture was established to honor the memory of our beloved colleague who was the Donald W. Logan Family Endowed Chair in American History, and the author of the award-winning book Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004). Before her untimely death in 2014, Professor Camp was writing a book about race and beauty. Her work remains a powerful influence on the fields of race, gender, and slavery in and beyond American history. This lecture is made possible by the generous contributions to the Camp Lecture Fund for the History of Race and Gender. Support this lecture series at giving.uw.edu/StephanieCamp