Wild Girls and the Pursuit of Justice and Joy: A Lecture by Tiya Miles
Explore how girls who found self-understanding in nature became women who changed America.
For the trailblazing women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, navigating the woods and taking to the streets in peaceful protest were not only techniques to resist assimilation, racism, and sexism, but were joyful pursuits. In her latest book, Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, award-winning historian Tiya Miles illuminates how Harriet Tubman’s time outdoors and struggles with illness and disability prepared her to escape enslavement and become the iconic leader of the Underground Railroad we’re all familiar with today. Miles will share stories of the indomitable bond between women and the wild, and why we must ensure equal access to outdoor spaces for young women of every race and class today.
The Guy Stanton Ford Lecture Series is presented by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost. Co-sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and Department of American Studies.
Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University, the author of seven works on race and slavery in the American past, and a 2011 MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient. She is the founder and director of the Michigan-based ECO Girls program and is the author of the National Book Award-winning, New York Times best-selling All That She Carried as well as The Cherokee Rose, a ghost story set in the plantation South and based on historical events.
Moderator: Jean M. O’Brien (citizen, White Earth Ojibwe Nation) is Regents Professor and Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She has published seven books on Native American and Indigenous studies and colonialism, most recently Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege (edited with Daniel Heath Justice) and Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit (with Lisa Blee) which won the inaugural Winthrop Prize from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. O’Brien is co-founder of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, is an elected member of the Society of American Historians, and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.
A book signing will follow this event at 4:00 pm. Book sales provided courtesy of the University of Minnesota Bookstore.
If you need assistance with your tickets, please call 612-624-2345, email umntix@umn.edu.
The Guy Stanton Ford Lecture Series is presented by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost. Co-sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and Department of American Studies.
