Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Hartman's major fields of interest are African American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, and performance studies. Her work has focused on slavery and its afterlife, and methods for redressing the violence and exceeding the limits of the historical archive.

Hartman's books include Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments; Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route; and Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America. She has published essays on photography, film and feminism. She is on the editorial board of Callaloo.

In the article "Venus in Two Acts," Hartman introduced the concept of "critical fabulation" and has embodied that methodology in writing that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative. The concept and its realization provides authors with ways to bridge theory and narrative, which provides voices to people who would otherwise be voiceless.

Hartman received her B. A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University. She has been a MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar.