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 and, more broadly, the ambiguities of citizenship in the early republic. My citizenship in the Cherokee Nation lies at the core of my research agenda.

Together with History Department colleagues, I’m co-organizing the History Brown Bag Seminar Series (@UCLAHist_BBag). Please be in touch if you are in the area and would like to workshop a paper!

Publications

• Review: Republic of Indians: Empires of Indigenous Law in the Early American South, Bradley J. Dixon, The William and Mary Quarterly 82, no. 2 (April 2025): 316-320.
• 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)
• Richards Center Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Civil War Era, Pennsylvania State University, 2024 (unable to accept)
• CRRES Postdoctoral Fellowship, Indiana University-Bloomington, 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
• Peter J. Reichard 1966 Memorial Research Award for Best Undergraduate Thesis, History Department, Dartmouth College. 2016

Degrees

Ph.D., Duke University, 2024.

B.A., cum laude, Dartmouth College, 2016.