Leila K. Blackbird (Louisiana Creole, unenrolled adoptee of Apache-Cherokee descent) is the Pozen Family Human Rights Doctoral Fellow of U.S. & Atlantic History at the University of Chicago.
Her dissertation, entitled “Embodied Violence in the Shatter Zone: Settler Colonialism and Slavery on America’s Third Coast,” centers enslaved Native and Black-Native people, especially women and children, at the core of U.S. history.
In addition to the Pozen Center for Human Rights, Leila is affiliated with the Newberry Consortium in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Life x Code and the Johns Hopkins Center for Africana Studies, the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies, and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University.
Leila holds both a B.A. and an M.A. in History from the University of New Orleans and an A.M. in History from the University of Chicago, where she is now a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History.
Leila Blackbird 