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Expert Inquiry

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2013

Smithsonian Museum of American History

Smithsonian Senior Fellowship

New Directions Fellowship

Choice Outstanding Academic Title

In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World Get

Roundtable: Why Does Agricultural History Matter?

Mapping Antebellum Rice Fields as a Basis for Understanding Human and Ecological Consequences of the Era of Slavery

Rice: Global Networks and New Histories

Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War

Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Blacks in the Diaspora)

Dr. Fields-Black is a specialist in the trans-national of West African rice farmers, peasant farmers in pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry during the antebellum period.

Fields-Black’s first monograph Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014 paperback, 2008 cloth) uses a unique blend of interdisciplinary sources and methods to chronicle the development of tidal rice-growing technology by the inhabitants of the West African Rice Coast region, the region where the majority of captives disembarking in South Carolina and Georgia originated.  By integrating linguistic evidence, biological and botanical studies of mangrove ecosystems, oral traditions, and travelers’ accounts from the first European traders to visit the coastal region, Deep Roots reconstructs a historical period pre-dating the first written sources for the region and beginning more than a millennium before the trans-Atlantic slave trade when both West African rice and rice farmers became important commodities.  This important study is the first to apply the comparative method of historical linguistics to the Atlantic languages of West Africa’s coast.  The narrative reveals the development of highly specialized and intensely localized agricultural technology and identities indigenous to West Africa’s coastal littoral.  It presents a rare picture of dynamic early coastal West African societies, challenging Africanists’ assumptions that rice-growing technology diffused from the interior to the coast.  A picture of a dynamic, diverse, highly specialized and localized pre-colonial Africa also stands in sharp contrast to Americanists’ constructions of a static, undifferentiated pre-modern Africa which acted as the progenitor of cultures in the African Diaspora.  Deep Roots builds on the underlying premise of the comparative method of historical linguistics—inheritance, innovation, and borrowing—to fashion a theory of cultural change which is sufficiently open and elastic to encompass the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African Diaspora.

Higher Education

Slave Trade

History

African History

Rice Farmers

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Google Scholar Citations

Smithsonian official testifies amid White House criticism

In researching her Pulitzer-winning book, CMU’s Fields-Black discovered a family connection

Pulitzer Prizes 2025: A Guide to the Winning Books and Finalists

NEH Fellowship Supports Slate’s Research on Civil Rights

National scholars to headline Stono Rebellion conference

Why Video Games Education Needs Harriet Tubman

South Carolina’s Black Majority (1708-1920)

'Farming While Black': A Guide To Finding Power And Dignity Through Food

Professor of History and Director of The Humanities Center

Edda Fields-Black interview excerpt

On Apil 29, 2021, The Frick Pittsburgh hosted an online conversation with  Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black and citizen artist Vanessa German on collective trauma, loss, and grief. Dr. Fields-Black is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University and the creative force behind Requiem for Rice, a contemporary symphonic tribute to Africans enslaved on Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations who remain "unburied, unmourned, and unmarked." Vanessa German is Visiting Artist at The Frick Pittsburgh. The first installation of her residency, Reckoning: Grief and Light, is on view at The Frick Art Museum. Information is available at https://www.thefrickpittsburgh.org/Exhibition-Vanessa-German

Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice is a contemporary, classical symphonic work inspired by the history of Africans enslaved on Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations, Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice was composed by three-time Emmy® award-winning composer Jonathan Wineglass based on the libretto written by Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black. Enhanced selections from the requiem score Artist-in-Residence Vanessa German's immersive, multisensory installation Reckoning: Grief and Light in the Frick's Italian gallery. Listen to the Colour of Music Festival Orchestra's full, unmodified debut of the work at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Music Hall on February 13, 2019 by visiting https://www.thefrickpittsburgh.org/uuu

In Conversation: Vanessa German and Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black

" ‘Combee’: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War" is the first original research about Harriet Tubman in more than 15 years and the first ever original research on Tubman’s Civil War service. This narrative history will tell the untold story of the Combahee River Raid from the perspective of Tubman and the enslaved people she helped to free based on new sources not previously used by historians, as well as new interpretations of sources familiar to Tubman’s biographers. It is the story of Harriet Tubman’s Civil War service during which she worked as a cook and nurse in Beaufort, SC, and gathered intelligence among freed people and enslaved blacks. It is the story of enslaved people who labored against their wills on nine rice plantations, ran for their lives, boarded the US gunboats, and sailed to freedom.

Dr  Edda Fields Black - Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid

Media Inquiry