Saidiya Hartman

Sadiya Hartman is a literary scholar, cultural historian, and professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  Her work examines the lived experience of slavery and its ongoing influence on American society. In an approach she calls “critical fabulation,” she blends historical research with imagined narratives, bringing to life people and stories that have been systematically excluded from the archive. Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). Her most recent book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (W. W. Norton, 2019) was awarded the 2021 PEN Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. 

Hartman is the recipient of the 2019 MacArthur Genius Grant. She has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana, a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University, and a Rockefeller Fellow at Brown University. She was born and raised in New York City.