Jonathan Schroeder

Jonathan Schroeder seeks to find new routes through the histories of race, ethnicity, migration and emotion in his research and teaching. Trained as an Americanist at the University of Chicago, he is particularly interested in understanding how frameworks of knowledge were devised in Europe and developed in the Americas to hierarchize humans and justify colonialism. If these hierarchies helped define what it means to be human, they also defined what it means to be racist—to divide humans. In tracking the movement of Enlightenment knowledges to the Americas, he aims to address blind spots in the histories of science and colonialism respectively, since these fields typically focus on either the emergence of knowledge or the reality of colonial exploitation, but not both. To address both at once is to ask how accounts of the human helped justify the reality of slavery, organize American institutions and shape subjectivity to this day.

In the midst of this research, Schroeder discovered a lost autobiography, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery(Chicago, 2024), that changed the course of his career. Written by Harriet Jacobs’ brother, John Swanson Jacobs, and published in Australia in 1855, this narrative is written in frank truth-to-power language that is unapologetic and defiant—and that urgently needed to be brought back into the world. In his attempt to do justice to John Jacobs, Schroeder produced an “auto/biographical” edition that complemented Jacobs’ autobiography with a biography. This edition has been reviewed by The New York Times, All Things Considered, The Boston Globe, and WNYC, among other outlets, and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for nonfiction in 2025, given to works that best advance our understandings of racism and appreciation of the diversity of human cultures. This work has benefited from long-term fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society and the John Carter Brown Library, as well as short-term fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Huntington Library.

Schroeder is now working on three books: Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia (under contract with Harvard), Lauren Berlant, A Reader (under contract with Duke), and American Monument: The Kinship of Harriet and John Jacobs. The first project tracks nostalgia’s formation in European Enlightenment medicine and its application to three American institutions of confinement: slavery, the military and the prison. The second is a collection of Berlant’s most important writings on national belonging, sexual cultures, and living in states of damage and disrepair. And finally, building on eight years of research on the canonical author Harriet Jacobs and her brother, John Swanson Jacobs, Schroeder is working on a full-scale biography of the Jacobs family. Stretching across three centuries, four continents, and eleven generations, this biography aims to make the Jacobs family an indispensable touchstone for understanding the American nation as the product of two experiments at once: one in democracy, the other in tyranny. This year, Schroeder is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Beyond these interests, Schroeder is also interested in changing how we interact with and understand the nonhuman. Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) followed Melville’s lead in considering the white whale and Captain Ahab as equally entangled in the natural world around them.