THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Longue durée US history; vast early America; the Atlantic world; the French Antilles; the Spanish Caribbean; Spanish borderlands; French North America; the postcolony and the Anglosphere; comparative empire; European imperial history and settler states; the United States in the world; Native American and Indigenous studies; Black studies; comparative race and ethnic studies; Afro/Indigenous futures; Latinidad/créolité; (post/de)colonialism and ecocriticism; colonialism and slavery; historical trauma, state violence, and genocide; gendered and racialized violence; displacement and diaspora; the long 18th century; human/civil rights and the history of the present; climate, migration, and resilience; equity, power, and conflict; the rule of law and transitional justice; sociolegal and environmental histories; critical theory and epistemic violence; the archive; digital and spatial humanities
BIOGRAPHY
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.
Currently the Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in History at Brown University, Dr. Blackbird is also 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. 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.
DISSERTATION
“Embodied Violence: Settler Colonialism and Slavery on America's Third Coast” (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2025).
NEWS
- Appointed Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University, 2024-2027
- Winner of the WMQ New Voices Prize, Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2023-2024
- Appointed to Academic Advisory Board, Stolen Relations, a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Funded Project, PI: Linford D. Fisher, 2022-2025
- Awarded National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) Grant, Keywords for Black Louisiana, PI: Jessica Marie Johnson, 2021-2023
- Named Doctoral Fellowship Coordinator, The University of Chicago’s Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, 2021-2025
- Winner of the Best PhD Essay Award, The University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, 2021-2022
- Awarded Mellon Research Grant, American Historical Association, 2021-2022
- Named Research Assistant, The American Historical Review, 2021-2022
- Awarded Pozen Family Human Rights Doctoral Fellowship, 2020-2025
- Elected Board Member, History Graduate Students Association, 2020-2021
Recent Research / Recent Publications
“Kinship & (Be)Longing: Reimagining the Place of Black Life in the Louisiana Colonial Archive,” Journal of Scholarly Editing 41, no. 1 (June 2024): n.p.
“‘It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages’: The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana Revisited, 1769-1803,” The William & Mary Quarterly 80, no. 3 (July 2023): 525-558.
“A Gendered Frontier: Métissage and Indigenous Enslavement in Eighteenth-Century Basse-Louisiane,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 56 no. 2 (Winter 2023): 205-212.
“Settler Invasion: Ecunnaunuxulgee and the Many Nations on the Edge of American Empire,” in The Cambridge History of the American Revolution vol. 3, Marjoleine Kars, Michael A. McDonnell, and Andrew M. Schocket, eds. (London: Cambridge University Press, In Press).
“Bulbancha is Still a Place: Decolonizing the History of the Present,” in Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community, Black-Indigenous Futures & Speculations Series, Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, Darryl Barthé & Andrew Jolivétte, eds. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021).
“How Making Space for Indigenous Peoples Changes History,” with Caroline Dodds Pennock, in What is History, Now?, Helen Carr & Suzannah Lipscomb, eds. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021).
“Review of A Kingdom of Water: Adaptation and Survival in the Houma Nation,” by J. Daniel d’Oney, The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 62, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 225-227.
“Keywords for Black Louisiana: Documents on Black Life–Augmented Edition,” National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC) funded project, PI: Jessica Marie Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2024).
“Keywords for Black Louisiana: Stories of Black Life–Story Site,” National Historical Publications &Records Commission (NHPRC) funded project, PI: Jessica Marie Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2024).
“Climates of Inequality – Standing Up on River Road: Black Activism in South Louisiana,” sponsored by Rutgers University, Humanities Action Lab, PI: Mary Niall Mitchell (New Orleans: University of New Orleans, 2019).
“Entwined Threads of Red and Black: The Hidden History of the Enslavement of Native Americans in Louisiana, 1719-1820” (New Orleans: University of New Orleans, 2019).