Department of History

Liza Black is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and a 2024-25 Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School where she is currently completing her book manuscript, How Settlers Get Away with Murder: The Killing of Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People in the Americas. How Settlers Get Away with Murder exposes the unpunished killing of Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. From police negligence to vigilante violence, this book reveals how settler states tacitly authorize these crimes—not through explicit orders, but through land theft, legal impunity, and the enduring logic of colonial elimination.

Black teaches as an Associate Professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Indiana University. In 2020, Black published Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960. Black has received several research grants including the Racial Justice Fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School; the Cherokee Nation Higher Education Grant; the Institute of Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University; the UCLA Institute of American Cultures fellowship; and the Ford pre-, doc and post- doc fellowships. She serves on council for both the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and the Western History Association. She is an invited member of The Policing Project at Harvard Kennedy School, an editorial board member of the Radical History Review, and Series Editor for New Directions in Native American Studies at University of Oklahoma Press.