April 6, 2016

Historian to talk race, gender, ghosts during SVSU seminar

An award-winning author and historian will discuss her study of race and gender in southern ghost tours during a Saginaw Valley State University event.

Tiya Miles will serve as the guest speaker during SVSU’s Barstow Humanities Seminar Tuesday, April 12‌, at 5:30 p.m. in the university’s Curtiss Hall Banquet Room B. The event is free and open to the public. Her talk originally had been scheduled for Tuesday, March 1‌ but was postponed due to inclement weather.
 
The event is titled “Ghost Tourism and the Specter of Slavery in New Orleans.”

Miles is a professor at the University of Michigan in the Department of American Culture, Department of Afro-American and African Studies, Department of History, Department of Women Studies, and Native American Studies Program.

She is the author of several history books including “Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era” in 2015. Her other work includes “Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom” from 2005 and “The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story” from 2010.

Miles also writes fiction, academic articles on indigenous women’s history, and feminist essays.

Her debut fictional novel, “The Cherokee Rose,” was set on a haunted plantation in the Cherokee territory of modern-day Georgia. Publishers Weekly selected the novel as the Pick Of The Week in 2015.

For more information on the event, contact SVSU at (989) 964-2103 or email jstinson@svsu.edu‌.