Kelley Fanto Deetz

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Kelley Fanto Deetz
Born
💼 Occupation

Kelley Fanto Deetz is an American public historian and historical archaeologist specializing in American slavery, the African diaspora, plantation history, and culinary history. She is the author of Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine (2017), which Smithsonian magazine included on its list of the ten best books on food of 2017.

Education

Deetz received a BA in Black Studies and History from the College of William & Mary in 2002. She earned an MA in African American Studies (2006) and a PhD in African Diaspora Studies, with a sub-field in anthropology, from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010.

Career

Archaeology

Deetz worked as a field archaeologist on Virginia plantation sites beginning in the 1990s, including Flowerdew Hundred Plantation, the James River Institute for Archaeology, and the Jamestown Rediscovery project at Historic Jamestowne. She subsequently worked in cultural resource management in California. She is a Registered Professional Archaeologist.

Academic appointments

Deetz was the Ainsworth Visiting Scholar at Randolph College from 2010 to 2012 and an assistant professor of history at Roanoke College from 2012 to 2014, where she founded the public history program. From 2014 to 2016 she was a postdoctoral research associate with the President's Commission on Slavery and the University at the University of Virginia, and she has taught at the University of Virginia, Randolph College, and the University of Lynchburg.

While at UVA, Deetz co-founded, with historian Jody Allen of William & Mary, the Universities Studying Slavery consortium.

Public history

From 2018 to 2024, Deetz was Vice President of Collections and Public Engagement at Stratford Hall, the ancestral home of Robert E. Lee in Westmoreland County, Virginia. In that role she oversaw education, interpretation, archaeology, and collections, and expanded the site's public interpretation of slavery.

In 2021, Governor Ralph Northam appointed Deetz Director of Education and Historic Interpretation at the Virginia Executive Mansion, where she developed the mansion's first interpretive program addressing the history of enslaved laborers there. She served on the mansion's Citizens Advisory Council from 2022 to 2024.

Deetz founded the History, Arts, and Science Action Network (H.A.S.A.N.), a nonprofit focused on historic preservation and descendant engagement, and led it as chief executive officer from 2017 to 2025. In 2025 she served as Interim Executive Director of the Independence Hall Association in Philadelphia. Later that year she was appointed Chief Advancement Officer of The Montpelier Foundation, the organization that operates James Madison's Montpelier.

Research and writing

Deetz's research focuses on the material and culinary culture of enslaved people in the Atlantic world, the archaeology of African diaspora religion, and the public interpretation of slavery at historic sites. Her 2017 book Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine, published by the University Press of Kentucky, examines the role of enslaved cooks in shaping Southern and American cuisine. The book was reviewed in academic and trade publications and was named one of the ten best books on food of 2017 by Smithsonian magazine.

In 2022, Deetz contributed to Tanya Holland's California Soul: Recipes from a Culinary Journey West by chef Tanya Holland, published by Ten Speed Press with a foreword by Alice Walker. A subsequent monograph, The Archaeology of Magic: The Material Culture of African Diaspora Conjuring in Domestic Spaces, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press.

Deetz has written cover features for National Geographic History and contributed to Smithsonian, USA Today, the journal Slavery and Abolition, and The Conversation where her 2019 essay on the depiction of cooks in plantation museums was widely discussed.

Film and media

Deetz was a material-culture advisor and on-screen scholar for Nate Parker's feature film The Birth of a Nation (2016) and contributed to the accompanying companion volume The Birth of a Nation: Nat Turner and the Making of a Movement (Simon and Schuster, 2016). She was a consulting producer and featured scholar for the National Geographic Channel documentary Rise Up: The Legacy of Nat Turner (2016) and a historical advisor for the Travel Channel series The Dead Files in 2013.

In 2021 she recorded a lecture series on the history of sugar for The Great Courses. She has appeared on the BackStory radio program and on Mount Vernon's Intertwined podcast, and was a panelist at South by Southwest in 2022.

Selected honors

• American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship (2009–2010)
• Andrew Mellon Fellow, Virginia Historical Society (2008, 2009)
• Gilder Lehrman Residential Fellowship, Colonial Williamsburg (2007)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in African American History and Culture, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (2011)
• Fellow National, The Explorers Club (elected 2017)
• National Lecturer, Archaeological Institute of America (2021–2022)

Selected works

Books

• Deetz, Kelley Fanto (2017). Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-7473-0. Search this book on
• Holland, Tanya; Hunt, Maria C.; Deetz, Kelley Fanto (2022). Tanya Holland's California Soul: Recipes from a Culinary Journey West. Ten Speed Press. ISBN 978-1-9848-6072-9. Search this book on

Selected articles

• "Finding Dignity in a Landscape of Fear: Enslaved Women and Girls at the University of Virginia," Slavery & Abolition (2018).
• "How Enslaved Chefs Helped Shape American Cuisine," Smithsonian (2018).
• "African Odyssey: The Epic Journey of Virginia's First Africans," National Geographic History (July/August 2019).
• "Stolen Bodies, Edible Memories: The Influence and Function of West African Foodways in the Early British Atlantic," in The Routledge History of Food (Routledge, 2014).

External links

• Kelley Fanto Deetz at The Conversation
• The Montpelier Foundation

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