Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman is a writer and professor at Columbia University. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997); Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (W. W. Norton, 2019), which received the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize from the American Studies Association, a Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, the Mary Nickliss Prize in US Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

At Radcliffe, Hartman is writing “Graces of the Unsung,” which examines the ordinary character of Black radicalism and the unexceptional people who did extraordinary things, propelled by a shared belief that they could transform the world.

Hartman, who earned a PhD at Yale University, received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and a University Professor at Columbia.