Jonathan Schroeder

Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies and English

Departments/Programs

American Studies
English

Degrees

University of Chicago, Ph.D.
Brown University, M.A.
Dartmouth College, A.B.

Expertise

Global American Literature; African American Literature; Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies; History of Medicine and Science; Affect Theory and History; Digital Humanities; Posthumanism; Historical Epistemology

Profile

Please visit my new faculty profile page.

I focus my research and teaching around constructions of race, ethnicity, migration, and emotion in the Americas from the eighteenth century onwards. I am particularly interested in studying the formation of Enlightenment knowledge and demonstrating how this knowledge was used within American institutions to produce new racial and ethnic divisions of humanity—often as ways to justify and certify captivity and conquest. Out of an investment in designing better ways of studying these areas, I am also interested in how our methods shape what we say about our objects of study. To this end, I test out different methods in my work, including the new empiricism of the Digital Humanities, the structural history of knowledge most closely associated with Michel Foucault, the “new” materialisms, and even biography. I am currently at work on two book projects: Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia (under contract with Harvard), which recovers a sprawling history of nostalgia as the disease of forced migration, and a biography of Harriet Jacobs's brother, John Jacobs, and critical edition of his lost autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Tale of Slavery (under contract with Chicago).

Awards and Honors

John Carter Brown Library Long-Term Fellowship (2021 - 2022)

American Antiquarian Society Long-Term Fellowship (2020 - 2021)

National Endowment for the Humanities Book Completion Fellowship (2020 - 2021)

Library Company of Philadelphia Short-Term Fellowship (2019 - 2020)

The Huntington Library Short-Term Fellowship (2018)

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities, Yale University (2016 - 2017)

Scholarship

Farmer, Meredith and Schroeder, Jonathan D.S., ed. Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn. University of Minnesota Press, 2022. (forthcoming)

Michel Foucault. "“Linguistics and Social Sciences”." Theory, Culture & Society Trans. Jonathan D.S. Schroeder and Chantal Wright. (2022) (forthcoming)

Schroeder, Jonathan. "“The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of Monomania”." Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn. Ed. Meredith Farmer and Jonathan D.S. Schroeder. University of Minnesota Press, 2022 (forthcoming)

Schroeder, Jonathan. "“‘The Wreck of Reason’: Nostalgia by Land and by Sea,”." The Cultural History of the Sea in the Age of Enlightenment. vol. 4 Ed. Jonathan Lamb. Bloomsbury, 2021. 135–153.

Michel Foucault. "Structuralism and Literary Analysis." Critical Inquiry vol. 45. Trans. Jonathan D.S. Schroeder and Suzanne Taylor. (2020)

Schroeder, Jonathan. "Nostalgia." The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies. Ed. Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb, and Juliane Tomann. Routledge, 2020. 156-159.

Schroeder, Jonathan. "“Slavery’s Legacies, Slavery’s Futures: New Horizons of the Study of Slavery”." Rev. of Yogita Goyal, Runaway Genres, Laura T. Murphy, The New Slave Narrative, and Janet Neary, Fugitive Testimony, Slavery & Abolition vol. 41 of 4 Fall 2020: 856–863.

Schroeder, Jonathan. "Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and her Circle 1879-1911." Rev. of Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and her Circle 1879-1911, by Louisa M. Jacobs. American Literary History Online Review vol. 19 2019

Schroeder, Jonathan. "What Was Black Nostalgia?." American Literary History 30. 4 (2018): 1-24.

Schroeder, Jonathan. "“The Painting of Modern Light: Local Color Before Regionalism”." American Literature 86. 3 (2014): 551-581.