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. The resulting publication, Despots, has been reviewed by The New York Times, All Things Considered, The Boston Globe, WNYC and many other outlets.
Schroeder is working on two books: Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia (under contract with Harvard) and Lauren Berlant, A Reader (under contract with Duke). 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, acting as both a gateway for new readers and a touchstone for old ones. Much of this work was made possible thanks to 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.
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. And at Congress of the Birds, a 501(c)3 that he co-founded with his partner, Sheida Soleimani, Schroeder annually rescues, rehabilitates and releases over 1,200 wild birds and is currently engaged in building a land center in a 42-acre forest in Chepachet, RI.
Academic areas of interest
Global American Literature; African American Literature & Literature of the Black Diaspora; Race, Ethnicity, and Transnational Migration; History of Medicine and Science; Affect Theory and History; Digital Humanities; Animal Studies; Anthropocene Studies; Historical Epistemology
Courses
Fall 2024 Courses
NOSTALGIA AT THE END OF THE WORLD
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In the past fifty years, nostalgia has become a global phenomenon. Today, the longing for lost places and times drives fashion, politics, art, architecture, literature, and much else. You are as likely to encounter nostalgia in a Marvel film (think X-Men: Days of Futures Past) as you are in the experimental art world. For some, nostalgia is a shameful form of self-indulgence—a foolish, self-sabotaging longing for a past that never existed. For others, it is an anchoring historical emotion—a mode of survival. Which is it? And how did the desire to be at home in the world become so critical to subjectivity? What is the relationship between nostalgia and today’s accelerating, looming crises, which are producing new words such as solastalgia: the emotional distress caused by environmental change?
THE FUTURE AS HISTORY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The Future as History: From the most daring visions of better worlds to the most apocalyptic depictions of dystopia, this course examines the arts of the future. In studying the formation of human, nonhuman, inhuman, and posthuman relationships to the future, you will read brilliant sci-fi & fantasy authors, consider how art constructs futures in response to the demands of the present, and develop a new understanding of the history of time and the time of history. The workload includes two essays. Authors assigned may include Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, N. K. Jemisin, Ursula Le Guin, and China Mièville.
Elective