Saidiya Hartman

CTL-E-6270 · Person · scholar · contemporary; Ph.D. 1992 — present

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07459 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6270.

Saidiya Hartman is an American scholar and writer who serves as a University Professor at Columbia University, where she teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1984 and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1992. Before joining Columbia she taught in the Department of English and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarship examines slavery and its afterlife in American literature, cultural history, law, and performance, and she is known for developing the method she calls critical fabulation, which joins archival research to disciplined speculation about lives the archive records only in fragments. She is the author of three books: Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019). The last of these received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Mary Nickliss Prize, the Judy Grahn Prize, and the John Hope Franklin Prize. Hartman received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.

The record

• Also known as: Saidiya V. Hartman

Notes

Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Scan Tail Wave 7 — 747 Program, FINAL Wave 13; seventh Scan Tail packet at the founder's 40-record size). Gate A (2026-10-16): Gate A CLEAR (hand-checked 2026-10-16): no Saidiya Hartman entity, alias, or variant in the live graph (3,910 entities); the graph's Hermene Hartman (CTL-E-1151) and Johnny Hartman (CTL-E-3963) records are different people. ID CTL-E-6270 free at staging. Supply: 747 Supply Ledger — Tier 4 corpus scan tail, corpus-gap-candidates-2026-10-15.json ranked #2957. The scan supplied the name string only; every fact is sourced under CTL-GOV-004. SCOPE GATE: Black American literary scholar and cultural historian whose three books anchor the modern study of slavery's afterlife; a standard citation across CTL's research corpus with no graph home. Vital status: LIVING — evidence dated 2026: Columbia University's department page (accessed 2026-10-16) lists her as a University Professor with Fall 2026 office hours, and Harvard's Radcliffe Institute profiles her in the present tense as a Columbia professor. STATISTICS — Education and honors, Columbia University department page and Radcliffe Institute (both accessed 2026-10-16): B.A. Wesleyan 1984; Ph.D. Yale 1992; MacArthur Fellowship 2019; American Academy of Arts and Sciences election 2022. No birth date is carried: neither opened institutional source states one, and no birth year is asserted in the description. MEDIA: photo HELD (named candidate in media spec; no license claimed); chart staged in media spec; video HELD (no matching-entity CTL Short); audio HELD (no rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged); map N/A (person record). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = N/A (Person records carry no map slot; maps attach to places and institutions.) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (Created for this packet (CTL graphic, CTL-PHOTO-001 lane) from the record's sourced facts.) | video = HELD (No matching-entity CTL Short in the Shorts Link Map (shorts-link-map-2026-10-15.json, 233 rows, checked by nam) | audio = HELD (HELD: No CTL-owned or rights-cleared matching-entity audio exists at staging.)

Relationships

• Columbia University — affiliated with
  Saidiya Hartman is a University Professor at Columbia University (CTL-E-4835, School/university), teaching in its Department of English and Comparative Literature, per Columbia's own department page. affiliated_with runs Person→School per the schema matrix.
• MacArthur Foundation — honored by
  Hartman received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019; the MacArthur Foundation is CTL-E-5256 (Organization) in the live graph. Both opened institutional sources (Columbia; Harvard Radcliffe) state the 2019 fellowship. honored_by runs Person→Organization per the schema matrix.

Referenced by

• Yale University — has alumnus → this record

Sources

• Columbia University, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Saidiya V Hartman (accessed 2026-10-16) — B.A., Wesleyan University (1984); Ph.D., Yale University (1992); author of Scenes of Subjection (1997), Lose Your Mother (2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019); Wayward Lives awards incl. National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; MacArthur Fellowship 2019; elected American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2022; University Professor at Columbia; Fall 2026 office hours listed — https://english.columbia.edu/content/saidiya-v-hartman (primary source · build store)
• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Saidiya Hartman (accessed 2026-10-16) — writer and professor at Columbia University; the three books and their years and publishers; Wayward Lives prize list; PhD at Yale University; MacArthur Fellowship 2019; American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2022; Royal Society of Literature member; University Professor at Columbia; current Radcliffe project 'Graces of the Unsung' — http://radcliffe.harvard.edu/people/saidiya-hartman (primary source · build store)

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Record CTL-E-6270 · Combined Graph record U-07459 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 2 sources · 3 mapped relationships.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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