Title Forthcoming: Saidiya Hartman
Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is a scholar of African American literature and cultural history. Her works—which include "Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America," "Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route" and, most recently, "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval"—explore the afterlife of slavery in modern American society.
According to the MacArthur citation, through her research and writing, Hartman bears "witness to lives, traumas and fleeting moments of beauty that historical archives have omitted or obscured," and "weaves findings from her meticulous historical research into narratives that retrieve from oblivion stories of nameless and sparsely documented historical actors, such as female captives on slave ships and the inhabitants of slums at the turn of the twentieth century."
Hartman received a BA (1984) from Wesleyan University and a PhD (1992) from Yale University. She was a professor in the department of English and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (1992–2006), prior to joining the faculty of Columbia University, where she is currently a professor in the department of English and comparative literature. She is the former director of the Institute for Research on Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University and was a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University (2002), a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2016–2017), and a Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (2018). In addition to her books, she has published articles in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Brick, Small Axe, Callaloo, The New Yorker and The Paris Review.
Professor Hartman will deliver the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' 2020 Quinones Lecture.
Photo credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation