Martha Schoolman

Professor Schoolman earned her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania and she specializes in 19th Century American Literature. She regularly teaches American Literature and the Tradition of Dissent, Antebellum Literature, Colonial and Early American Literature, as well as special topics classes on Native American Literatures and Literary Environmentalisms. Her graduate seminars address various themes in contemporary US literary study including 'The Hemispheric 1850s,' 'The Archive,' and 'American Environments.'

Professor Schoolman has held fellowships at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, the American Antiquarian Society, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

Research Areas

Professor Schoolman's research examines the literature of social reform connected to the transnational antislavery movement and its cultural afterlives. She is the author of Abolitionist Geographies (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and co-editor with Jared Hickman of the essay collection Abolitionist Places (Routledge, 2013). Her essays and reviews have appeared in American Literary History, Arizona Quarterly, Atlantic Studies, Cincinnati Review, Common-place, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Journal of American History, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Southern Quarterly and the essay collections American Literary Geographies (University of Delaware Press, 2007), Mapping Region in Early American Writing (University of Georgia Press, 2015), and the Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century (De Gruyter, 2018). Her current research is in two related areas: first, a book project currently titled Jamaica in 1850 that moves beyond the frame of Abolitionist Geographies to engage the surprising density of material and imagined connections between the US and Jamaica in the 1850s; second, a series of essays on the literary genealogies of post-Civil War "abolitionisms."

Professor Schoolman currently serves on the Graduate Literature Committee and as a mentor with the HSI Pathways Program. Outside of FIU, she serves on the editorial boards of ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists; on the program committee for the biennial conference of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists; and as the co-director for the Bavarian-American Academy Summer Academy.