MacArthur Foundation Fellow: Saidiya V. Hartman
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Join Saidiya V. Hartman, Columbia University Professor of English and Comparative Literature and 2019 MacArthur Foundation Fellow for a conversation on her research and her recent book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019).
6 PM │Registration opens
6: 30 PM │Conversation begins
The Work
Saidiya Hartman is a scholar of African American literature and cultural history whose works explore the afterlife of slavery in modern American society and bear witness to lives, traumas, and fleeting moments of beauty that historical archives have omitted or obscured. She 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.
Ms. Hartman most recent book is Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019).
Biography
Saidiya 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.
This event is co-hosted be the Columbia University Club and the Penn Club.