Zoe Trodd teaches at Columbia University in the English Department and the Institute for Research in African American Studies. Her main focus is protest literature and visual culture, especially the literature and art of civil rights, anti-lynching and abolitionism. Her courses this year range from undergraduate classes on African American Protest Literature and African American Photographic Culture to a graduate seminar on Historical Memory. She has a PhD (06/09) from Harvard University's History of American Civilization department and a BA/MA (06/01) from Cambridge University in English Literature. Between 2001 and 2003 she was a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard with visiting scholar status. In 2008-09 she was an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Fellow and in 2009-10 she was postdoctoral fellow at UNC Chapel Hill, in the Center for the Study of the American South. Her dissertation about the memory of abolitionism in late 19th- and 20th-century American protest literature won the Helen Choate Bell Prize and was a finalist for the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize. It is forthcoming as a book. She is working on several other book projects, including a monograph about representations of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 20th-century literature and art, an anthology of responses to John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and a co-authored book about Brown and Nat Turner.
