Saidiya Hartman

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Saidiya Hartman (born 1961) is an American writer and scholar who studies African-American literature, culture, and history. She teaches in the English department at Columbia University.

Hartman grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. from Yale University. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1992–2006) before joining Columbia University in 2007. In 2020 she was promoted to university professor at Columbia. She has held several fellowships, including Fulbright and Rockefeller, and has received awards such as the Narrative Prize (2007) and the MacArthur Fellowship (2019). She became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022 and was named a Royal Society of Literature International Writer the same year. Hartman also serves on the editorial board of Callaloo.

Hartman's work focuses on African-American literature, cultural history, slavery, law and literature, gender studies, and performance. She is best known for introducing the idea of “critical fabulation,” a method that blends archival research with storytelling to explore silences in the records of trans-Atlantic slavery and to give voice to enslaved women.

Her major books are:
- Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), which examines slavery, gender, and the formation of modern ideas about race.
- Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), which studies memory, representation, and the continuing impact of slavery on society.
- Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019), which looks at Black women in Harlem and Philadelphia in the 1890s, showing how they navigated surveillance and violence and challenged ideas about Black womanhood. This book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (2019) and was listed by The New York Times in 2024 as one of the top 100 books of the 21st century.

Hartman’s work is widely cited for its blend of theory and narrative and for highlighting the voices left out of traditional archives. She explores how slavery continues to shape society and how careful, thoughtful storytelling can illuminate difficult histories.