Dr. Saidiya Hartman

Dr. Saidiya Hartman is University Professor at Columbia University and a 2019 MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, published by W. W. Norton in 2019, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007; and Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, published by Oxford University Press in 1997, a field-defining academic monograph that has been reissued in subsequent editions including a 25th anniversary edition.

Her academic training was at Wesleyan University and Yale where she earned her PhD. Her scholarly agenda is grounded in African American literature, archival method, Black feminist theory, and the long arc of what she has named critical fabulation — the scholarly practice of working in archives that have been structured by the violence they document, filling silences through imaginative reconstruction grounded in archival traces and structured by methodological discipline.

Her mentor focus is the archival method, critical fabulation as scholarly practice, and the long apprenticeship of literary nonfiction within the academy. The specific work of identifying, accessing, and working through archives that are structurally limited. The methodological discipline of critical fabulation — what it permits, what it does not, the rigor it requires. The teaching of method to doctoral students working in adjacent fields.

Her secondary mentor focus is the doctoral-supervision work. The relationship between dissertation advisor and advisee. The discipline of reading drafts and providing feedback. The committee politics. The slow preparation of a dissertation that is publishable as a first book. The post-doctoral and academic-job-market work that follows.

Mentees who book with Saidiya come from three primary populations. First: doctoral students in African American studies, English, history, and adjacent fields working with archives that require methodological reflection on the limits of those archives. Second: junior faculty in their first-book revision work. Third: writers without academic positions working in long-form nonfiction with archival grounding.

Her style is reflective and precise. She reads writing carefully. She holds the question with the mentee for as long as the question requires. The sessions are not fast. The sessions are deep. Mentees who come prepared for that pace find the work most useful.

Outside the Columbia position she serves on editorial boards across her field, has held fellowships at major research institutions, and continues to publish across academic-journal venues and adjacent long-form literary publications. Her engagement with the public platform is selective.

She is a member of the Academia and Research network here as a senior member of the humanities subgroup, and contributes to discussion threads on the specific topic of archival method and on the broader topic of doctoral supervision. She is also active in the Creative Arts and Media Circle on the topics of long-form nonfiction craft and the relationship between scholarship and literary nonfiction.

Sessions are 60 minutes. The pre-session brief is a CV, current writing sample (no more than thirty pages), and a one-page document on the specific question or draft material. For dissertation chapter feedback she requires the draft at least two weeks before the session. The session structure is reflective; she works the specific material at the pace it requires. Mentees leave with detailed written notes and a specific action list. Follow-up sessions are common for mentees in active dissertation work or first-book revision.

Her work on critical fabulation as scholarly method has shaped subsequent scholarship across African American studies, history, English, and adjacent fields. The method requires the scholar to grapple seriously with the limits of archives that were structured by the violence they document while maintaining the scholarly discipline that distinguishes critical fabulation from invention. The boundary between the two is a central methodological question. She works with doctoral students and junior scholars on exactly that boundary.

The Wayward Lives book represents the fullest application of the critical-fabulation method across an extended scholarly project. The book traces the intimate lives of Black girls and women in early-twentieth-century Philadelphia and New York through archival traces that have historically been treated as marginal. The work has been recognized with major awards across academic and trade-publishing venues.

Her early Scenes of Subjection work is field-defining in the academic study of slavery and the long aftermath. The book has been reissued in subsequent editions including a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition with additional material. The intellectual labor of the book has shaped multiple subsequent academic conversations.

Her doctoral-supervision practice across her tenure at Columbia has produced a body of former students who are now themselves senior scholars and writers across multiple institutions. The mentor practice she runs through this platform is consistent with her broader supervision practice — careful, slow, and demanding of the specific work the mentee brings.

Her engagement in the platform's Academia and Research network and the Creative Arts and Media Circle is selective and substantive. Her contributions to discussion threads on the topics of archival method, critical fabulation, and the long apprenticeship of literary nonfiction within the academy are central reference points for doctoral students and junior faculty whose own work touches on similar methodological territory.

The academic-research landscape continues to evolve in ways that affect Black and African women scholars specifically. The tenure-and-promotion structural conditions, the publication-venue politics, the funding landscape, and the institutional-service expectations all contribute to the long-arc career-trajectory questions that mentees bring to the mentor practice. The mentor practice connects specifically to the senior-level career-progression questions and to the long-arc structural conditions of the academic profession.

Her current scholarly agenda continues to extend the critical-fabulation method across new archival and research contexts. Her doctoral-supervision practice across her tenure at Columbia has produced former students who are now themselves senior scholars and writers across multiple institutions. Her fellowship and visiting-position work has been at major research institutions across the past two decades.

The mentor practice on this platform is part of a broader commitment to structured, professional mentorship for African and African-diaspora women across the long arc of their careers. The platform's session-management infrastructure — booking, calendaring, payment (where applicable), pre-session briefs, in-session notes, and post-session follow-up — is designed to support sustained mentor-mentee relationships across multiple sessions for mentees who benefit from that continuity. Mentees are welcome to book initial single sessions, structured multi-session engagements, or ongoing relationships across longer career arcs. The structure follows the work.