Nakia Parker

Nakia Parker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and affiliated faculty in the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Michigan State University. Dr. Parker is a historian of nineteenth-century U.S. slavery, African American, and American Indian history. She received her Ph.D. in History from The University of Texas at Austin in 2019. From 2019-2021, Dr. Parker was a College of Social Science Dean’s Research Associate in the Department of History. She is currently working on her first book, Trails of Tears, Lives of Bondage: Black Life and the Limits of Kinship in Indian Slave Country, 1830-1866, which examines the lives of enslaved and self-liberated individuals of African and Afro-Native descent in Choctaw and Chickasaw communities in nineteenth-century Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Her research has received funding and awards from several institutions, including the MSU Humanities and Arts Research Program (HARP), the Association of American University Women (AAUW), the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and the Western History Association. Her work has been published in several academic and popular journals and books, including The Journal of African American History, Southern Cultures, and in the New York Times best-seller, 400 Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019. Her research has been featured on several public history websites, including The History Channel, the podcast Teaching Hard History for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching for Justice Initiative, and The University of Texas at Austin’s 15 Minute History. Dr. Parker works with the research team of Enslaved.org and is the secretary and Director of Development for the non-profit organization Black Women Legacies, which provides a free online database of memorials and historic sites of Black women in the United States and globally.

Upcoming Presentations:

Thursday, October 12, 2023 @ 4PM: Eastern Michigan University speaker series, “Indigenous Histories”