In President’s Lecture, Pulitzer Prize-winning CMU Historian Explains How She Uncovered Voices From the Past

For Carnegie Mellon University’s Edda L. Fields-Black, history provides a perspective that can offer solutions and insights into the human condition.

Fields-Black, who earned a 2025 Pulitzer Prize in history, joined Carnegie Mellon President Farnam Jahanian for his President’s Lecture Series(opens in new window) on Monday. At CMU, she is an accomplished professor in the Department of History and director of the Humanities Center at CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

“In our very fractured world, where there’s so many divisions, war, you name it, we need the solutions. Many of those solutions would be more successful if they look back at the past and look at the source." — Edda Fields-Black

Fields-Black, through her work in the humanities at CMU, acts as a guide for turning that passion and storytelling into solutions, according to Jahanian.

"What makes Edda’s work so powerful is not just what it reveals about the past, but also how it resonates today. It restores identity, reconnects communities and reminds us that scholarship can deepen our understanding of freedom and humanity. Edda’s work reflects the very best of Carnegie Mellon, bringing together disciplines, perspectives and insights to generate knowledge, understanding and impact." — Farnam Jahanian

For her 2024 book, “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War,” Fields-Black reviewed more than 160 U.S. Civil War pension files to tell the story of abolitionist Harriet Tubman and her role in helping free 756 men, women and children during a U.S. Army operation in South Carolina rice plantations on June 1 and 2, 1863.

“They provide an intimate view of enslaved people and their communities, to which historians have not before been privy, and this intimate view helps to restore the humanity of the enslaved, which the institution of slavery was designed to strip away. The history of thousands of enslaved communities and tens of thousands of enslaved people is waiting to be discovered. Millions of African Americans could potentially use the U.S. Civil War pension files to break down the 1870 Brick Wall to know the names of our enslaved ancestors, to learn our history and to pass our ancestors’ stories down to future generations.” — Edda Fields-Black

AI and other technology can help synthesize many more primary sources and records in order to provide better solutions, but the challenges we face today are both timely and timeless as human beings, Fields-Black said.

“The future of the humanities is in solving real world problems and taking on the challenges of our increasingly global society. They’re human made, and they’re going to require human solutions … As long as there are these kinds of challenges, there’s an important goal for the humanities in helping us find the solutions.” — Edda Fields-Black

When asked for her advice to students, Fields-Black said they should harness what motivates them to look for those solutions.

“Study your passions in the classroom and outside of the classroom, think about what you want to do, find people who are doing it successfully, or have done it, and go talk to those people. Go tell them your hopes and dreams, and then come back three weeks later, and give them an update.”  — Edda Fields-Black