Barbara J. Fields

Barbara Jeanne Fields is a professor of American history at Columbia University. Her focus is on the history of the American South, 19th century social history, and the transition to capitalism in the United States.

She received her B.A. from Harvard University in 1968, and her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1978. At Yale, she was one of the last doctoral students of C. Vann Woodward, one of the preeminent American historians of the twentieth century. She made a notable appearance on Ken Burns' documentary series, "The Civil War" and was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellow from 1992 to 1997.

Her publications also include "Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century" (Yale University Press), which won the John H. Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association, and co-authored with members on 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; "Slaves No More: Three Essays on the Emancipation and the Civil War" (Cambridge University Press, 1992); and "Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Civil War" (The New Press, 1992), to which the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College awarded its Lincoln Prize in 1994. Fields was the first Afro-American woman to receive tenure at Columbia University. She has also taught at Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Mississippi. She is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled "Humane Letters: Writing in English about Human Affairs", as well as a study of slavery and emancipation in the Americas.

In May 2007, Bard College awarded Fields an honorary doctorate.