Liza Black is an Associate Professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Indiana University. A specialist in the history of Native America, she is the author of How to Get Away with Murder: A Transnational History of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirits (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) and Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) and the co-editor of a forum on the carceral state in the American Historical Review and a special issue on gender in the Native American and Indigenous Studies journal. Her newest book, How to Get Away with Murder, examines how the police state and white supremacy generate the crisis of gendered violence against Native people in the Americas through six microhistories of solved and unsolved cases. Her editorial projects further her expertise in how policing and gender work together to surveil and threaten Native communities in the twentieth century. 

 

A recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including the Racial Justice Fellowship at Harvard University, the Ford pre-, doc and post-doc fellowships, and the Institute of American Cultures at UCLA fellowship, Black has also received teaching awards including the Trustees Teaching Award at Indiana University. As a citizen of Cherokee Nation (there are two other Cherokee Nations, hence she drops “the”), she is most proud of her Cherokee Nation Higher Education Grant. She serves on council for both the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and the Western History Association. Looking toward the future of Native Studies, she functions as the Series Editor for Native American Studies at University of Oklahoma Press.