Barbara J. Fields

Barbara J. Fields is a professor of history at Columbia University , specializing in the history of the American South. She was visiting editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland , College Park, 1981/82. She is the author of Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press, 1985), which won the John H. Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association. She co-authored, with members of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, The Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 1985), which won the Founders Prize of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society and the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for the History of the Federal Government and Slaves No More: There Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1992). In 1994 the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College awarded the Lincoln Prize to Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Civil War (The New Press, 1992), also a publication of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which she co-edited. Among her other awards and fellowships are a Michael Clark Rockefeller Fellowship at Harvard University, the George Washington Egleston Prize at Yale University, and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. From 1992-97 she was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellow. She was a featured commentator in Ken Burns' acclaimed PBS documentary “The Civil War.” Dr. Fields delivered the annual W.E.B. Du Bois lecture series at Harvard University in 1995 and she has lectured widely in the United States , as well as in Canada , Paraguay , Brazil , Australia , and Japan . She is currently at work on a book entitled “Humane Letters: Writing in English About Human Affairs.” 

Dr. Fields was born in Charleston , South Carolina , and raised in Washington , D.C. , where she attended Morgan Elementary School , Banneker Junior High School , and Western High School . She earned her bachelor's degree from Harvard University , and her M. Phil, and Ph.D. from Yale University , where she studied under C. Vann Woodward. Before joining the faculty at Columbia she taught at the University of Michigan . During the fall of 1988 she was visiting Ford Professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi . 
 


NOTE: material on this page was sourced from the events page of the exhibition prepared by the local curators.

END OF PAGE