Vivien Tejada

Field of Study

United States, Slavery, Native American History, Labor

Research

I am a scholar of the nineteenth-century United States with a focus on the Civil War era. Overall, my research interests lie in the intersections between Native American history and African American history. My current project, “Unfree Soil: Empire, Labor, and Coercion in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, 1812-1861,” examines the relationship between slavery and conquest in the Upper Midwest. I ask how federal policy, the law, and settler colonialism fostered unfreedom in an ostensibly free portion of the United States. I am also engaged in research on Native Americans’ adoption of U.S. citizenship prior to the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868.

Publications

• Contribution to “The Agency Dilemma: A Forum,” The American Historical Review 128, no. 2 (June 2023): 919-921.

Awards & Grants

• IDEAL Provostial Postdoctoral Fellowship, Stanford University, 2024 (unable to accept)
• Katherine Goodman Stern Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Duke University, 2023
• F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellowship, Forest History Society, 2021
• Alfred M. Landon Research Grant, Kansas Historical Society, 2020
• Bordin-Gillette Researcher Travel Fellowship, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, 2020
• James B. Duke Fellowship, The Graduate School, Duke University, 2017
• Jonathan B. Rintels Prize for Best Honors Thesis in the Social Sciences, Dartmouth College, 2017

Degrees

Ph.D., Duke University, 2024.

B.A., Dartmouth College, 2016.