Department of History

Professor Black has received fellowships from Harvard University, UCLA, the Ford Foundation, and Cherokee Nation. Her current project, How to Get Away with Murder, provides six case microhistories, arguing that the current crisis is a historic reflection of settler colonial relations with Indigenous people. How to Get Away with Murder will be published with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2025. She is a 2024-25 Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and Associate Professor at Indiana University.

Black examines the intersections of representation and violence. As a citizen of Cherokee Nation, she developed a lifelong interest in studying Native identity and struggle and detailing the history of Native people’s encounters with violence from citizens and the state. She employs the disciplines of history, Native American studies, film studies, and gender studies to creatively combine traditional archives, oral history, storytelling, and tribal histories. Her work has appeared in more than 20 academic and non-academic outlets. Her work has appeared in academic and non-academic forums, including NPR podcasts, the PBS video series Origins, and international news outlets such as El País.

Her first book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960, was published in 2020. She serves on council for both the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and the Western History Association. She is the Series Editor for New Directions in Native American Studies at University of Oklahoma Press and is co-editing a forum in the American Historical Review on Native people and the carceral state.