Jonathan Schroeder is concerned with the histories of race, ethnicity, migration and emotion. Trained as an Americanist and affect theorist at the University of Chicago, he is particularly interested in tracing how hierarchical frameworks for dividing humans were formed in Europe and transformed in Europe’s colonies and ex-colonies in the 19th-century Americas, the United States above all. Because historians traditionally focus on the matter of transatlantic slavery—geography, scale, economics, social structures and resistance—we know too little about how frameworks of knowledge helped justify slavery, organize American institutions and shape individual subjects. Nor do we know enough about how these frameworks continue to shape our world.

In the book he is currently working on, Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia (under contract with Harvard University Press), Schroeder brings this approach to emotion and specifically to the case of nostalgia, which was once the disease of forced migration. In fact, in the 18th and 19th centuries, nostalgia was a disease of worlds both Old and New, its victims invariably the soldiers, sailors, slaves and prisoners who grew sick of being moved around the Atlantic world.

He is also interested in changing how we study and write about the nonhuman. Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), which he edited with Meredith Farmer, challenges a critical consensus that treats Ahab’s totalitarian rule as a product of his sovereign will. Instead, they consider him as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment in ways that challenge presumed boundaries of persons and nations, as well as the racist and environmental violence baked into the categories of the human and the person. 

Schroeder’s commitment to the environmental and medical humanities is born out in practice too, as he is a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, who rescues, rehabilitates and releases 1,000+ wild birds each year via Congress of the Birds in Providence. His work has benefited from fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Huntington Library.