Academic Historian

Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon in the Department of History and a specialist in early/pre-colonial and West African history.  She is author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in Afriac and the African Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2008).  Fields-Black is currently working on both sides of the Atlantic: she is co-authoring Rice: Global Networks and New Histories with Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, and Dagmar Schafer and writing a second monograph, a historical study of the Gullah/Geechee in South Carolina and Georgia.

Deep Roots Across the Atlantic: Rice and Race in Africa and the Americas

Carnegie Mellon University historian Edda L. Fields Black’s 2008 book, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora, opened a vast new area of diasporic study by linking the cultivation of rice in Africa to the rise of this crucially important food … Read MoreDeep Roots Across the Atlantic: Rice and Race in Africa and the Americas