Professor Black is a historian who employs forensic archival methods within 19th and 20th century North America. As a 2024–25 Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, she excavated institutional and state-sanctioned archives to trace asymmetrical sovereignty. Her research there resulted in the forthcoming How Settlers Get Away with Murder (Beacon, 2026).
Recipient of fellowships from Harvard University, Cornell University, University of California Los Angeles, Cherokee Nation, and the Ford Foundation, Black's research advances a transnational, historical critique. Black's community-engaged praxis circulates through academic journals and media outlets such as NPR and PBS.
PUBLICATIONS
How Settlers Get Away with Murder: The Killing of Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People in the Americas (Beacon Press, 2026).
Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020).
"Unsettling Homelands: Radical Histories of the (Ethno)Nation-State" edited by Liza Black and Adrian De Leon. Special issue, Radical History Review (2026).
“Making America 1884 Again: Weaponizing History Against Native Rights,” in Trump 100 Days, Harvard Kennedy School, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Discussion Paper Series, 2025-03. April 29, 2025. Full text.
“International Women’s Day: A Time for Reflection and Action,” Harvard Kennedy School, Carr Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy Blog, March 7, 2025. Full text.
“Savanna Greywind: Motherhood, Murder, and Settler Colonialism.” Harvard Kennedy School, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Discussion Paper Series, 2025-002, March 17, 2025. Full text.
“The Future of Indigenous Rights Under Trump,” in Post-Election 2024: The Future of Human Rights in the U.S., by the Carr Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, December 15, 2024. Full text.
“Gendered Violence and Reproductive Justice in Native America,” with Brianna Theobald in Reproductive Justice and the Afterlife of Colonial Reproductive Violence, edited by Susanne Klausen (University of California Press, 2026).
"Review of Killers of the Flower Moon, dir. Martin Scorsese,” Indiana Magazine of History 121 (December 2024).
“Curating Feminist Film Archives: A Zoom Roundtable about Cinema's First Nasty Women,” Feminist Media Histories 10 (2024): 114-125.
“Native People and American Film and TV,” Oxford Encyclopedia of American History (2022).
“Native TV in 2021: Putting the I in BIPOC,” American Historical Review: Perspectives on Culture (2022).
“Native Mother, Native Daughter, Native Granddaughter: The Murder of Savanna Greywind and the Abduction of Haisley Jo,” Gender and the American West, edited by Susan Bernardin (Routledge, 2022).
Liza Black, Tommy Rock, Mihio Manus, and Josh Garrett-Davis “Strata of Meaning: Monument Valley in and out of Frame on the Navajo Nation,” Journal of Arizona History 63, no 3 (2022): 363-388.
“The Exiles: Native Survivance & Urban Space in Downtown Los Angeles,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 42 (2018): 155-182.Liza Black and Nicholas Rosenthal, eds., Representing Native Peoples: Native Narratives of Indigenous History and Culture. Special issue, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 42, no. 3 (2018).
IU COURSES
Intro to Native American and Indigenous Studies (History-A 207)
What is History? (History-H 270)
Undergraduate Readings in History (History-X 490)
Issues in World History (History-W 200)
Writing in History (History-J 300)
Colloquium in United States History (History-H 650)
Intro to Professional Study of History (History-H 601)
Experimental Topics (College-X 101)
Indigenous Worldviews in the Americas (AMST-A 275)
US Arts & Media (AMST-A 202)
Intro to Native Am and Indigenous Studies Grad Sem (AMST-G 605)
Intro to Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS-A 150)
The College of Arts + Sciences