Edda L. Fields-Black
Edda L. Fields-Black is a specialist in the transnational history of West African rice, of peasant farmers in the precolonial Upper Guinea coast, and of enslaved laborers on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. She is author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and coeditor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories. She is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice” (with three-time Emmy Award–winning classical music composer, John Wineglass). Her most recent book is the Pulitzer Prize–winning Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War.
Fields-Black has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz History Center. She and her family live in Pittsburgh, where she teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center.
Edda L. Fields-Black is a specialist in the transnational history of West African rice, of peasant farmers in the precolonial Upper Guinea coast, and of enslaved laborers on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. She is author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and coeditor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories. She is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice” (with three-time Emmy Award–winning classical music composer, John Wineglass). Her most recent book is the Pulitzer Prize–winning Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War.
Fields-Black has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz History Center. She and her family live in Pittsburgh, where she teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center.
Artwork by Charlie Buckley, Soybean Neon
