February 6-7, 2025: Black Dolls Symposium Featuring Tiya Miles

Join The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures for a research symposium on the historical significance of Black dolls in America, c. 1850-present. This symposium is part of programming for the exhibition Portraits of Childhood: Black Dolls from the Collection of Deborah Neff, on view through March 3, 2025, and will feature a lecture by keynote speaker Dr. Tiya Miles.

REGISTER for the keynote lecture here https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tiya-miles-tickets-978446829807

About the Keynote Speaker:

Tiya Miles is the author of eight books, including four prize-winning histories about race and slavery in the American past. Her latest work is the biography Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Her 2021 National Book Award winner, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller that won eleven historical and literary prizes, including the Cundill History Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. All That She Carried was named A Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, The Atlantic, Time, and more. Her other nonfiction works include Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, The Dawn of Detroit, Tales from the Haunted South, The House on Diamond Hill, and Ties That Bind. Miles publishes essays and reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and other media outlets, and she is the author of the time-bridge novel, The Cherokee Rose, a ghost story set in the plantation South. She has consulted with colleagues at historic sites and museums on representations of slavery, African American material culture, and the Black-Indigenous intertwined past, including, most recently, the Fabric of a Nation quilt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been supported by a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Miles was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she is currently the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.

Evening Program:

• Keynote Lecture by Tiya Miles: 6-7PM
• Book sale and signing: 7-8PM

Sponsors:

This program is a part of the Portraits of Childhood: Black Dolls from the Collection of Deborah Neff event series and is supported by The City of Kansas City, Missouri Neighborhood Tourist Development Fund; the Hall Family Foundation; Rainy Day Books; Shutz Lecture Series; the UMKC Women’s Center, and a generous private donor.

Image Credit: Deborah Neff Collection, c. 1850-1940, Artist Unknown, United States. Photo: Ellen McDermott Photography, New York.