Dr. Fields-Black is a specialist in early and pre-colonial African history whose research interests extend into the African Diaspora.

Fields-Black’s first monograph Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014 paperback, 2008 cloth) uses a unique blend of interdisciplinary sources and methods to chronicle the development of tidal rice-growing technology by the inhabitants of the West African Rice Coast region, the region where the majority of captives disembarking in South Carolina and Georgia originated. By integrating linguistic evidence, biological and botanical studies of mangrove ecosystems, oral traditions, and travelers’ accounts from the first European traders to visit the coastal region, Deep Roots reconstructs a historical period pre-dating the first written sources for the region and beginning more than a millennium before the trans-Atlantic slave trade when both West African rice and rice farmers became important commodities. This important study is the first to apply the comparative method of historical linguistics to the Atlantic languages of West Africa’s coast. The narrative reveals the development of highly specialized and intensely localized agricultural technology and identities indigenous to West Africa’s coastal littoral. It presents a rare picture of dynamic early coastal West African societies, challenging Africanists’ assumptions that rice-growing technology diffused from the interior to the coast. A picture of a dynamic, diverse, highly specialized and localized pre-colonial Africa also stands in sharp contrast to Americanists’ constructions of a static, undifferentiated pre-modern Africa which acted as the progenitor of cultures in the African Diaspora. Deep Roots builds on the underlying premise of the comparative method of historical linguistics—inheritance, innovation, and borrowing—to fashion a theory of cultural change which is sufficiently open and elastic to encompass the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African Diaspora.

Fields-Black is also co-authored of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2015) with Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, and Dagmar Schafer and served as Co-Organizer of “New Histories of Rice Conference” sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin, Germany in March 2011.

Her research has been funded by the Woodrow Wilson, Ford, Annenberg, and Mellon Foundations as well as by Fulbright-Hays. Professor Fields-Black’s has received funding from the Henry Luce Foundation Project: The Greening of Early Undergraduate Education at Carnegie Mellon and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation: Institute for the Study of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology. Professor Fields-Black serves as the Faculty Advisor for Carnegie Mellon’s African and African American Studies Minor.