Department of History

Leila K. Blackbird (née Garcés) is of mixed settler, Creole, and Indigenous descent. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago where she also earned an A.M. in U.S. & Atlantic History and a Graduate Certificate in Human Rights Theory & Practice. She is a sociolegal scholar, critical digital humanist, and postcolonial theorist, and her research focuses on slavery, genocide, and state violence. Her dissertation, entitled “Embodied Violence: Settler Colonialism and Slavery on America’s Third Coast,” is a study of the relationship between divergent colonialisms and the enslavement of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous peoples in the Gulf South across French, Spanish, and Anglo-American regimes. 

At Brown, she is an affiliate of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI), the John Carter Brown Library, and the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. She formerly served as Senior Research Editor for Keywords for Black Louisiana (K4BL)—a National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC)-funded project at Johns Hopkins University—overseeing core research and language team operations and taught courses at UChicago on militant democracy and authoritarianism, Indigeneity and diaspora, and critical race studies.

Dr. Blackbird additionally holds a B.A. in African American History and an M.A. in Global History from the University of New Orleans. Her work has been featured in books such as Louisiana Creole Peoplehood and What is History, Now? and in the journals Eighteenth-Century Studies, Scholarly Editing, and The William & Mary Quarterly. Her article, “‘It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages’: The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana Revisited, 1769-1803,” recently won the Omohundro Institute’s WMQ New Voices Award. A forthcoming piece is expected in A Cambridge History of the American Revolution.