Grow

Adam Rothman is a Professor in the History Department, Interim Chair of the History Department, and Director of Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies.

Rothman studies the history of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, and the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Atlantic history, 19th century U.S history, and the history of slavery. He mentors PhD and MA students as well as undergraduates in History and American Studies. Rothman has received Georgetown’s President’s Award for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers (2024), the Provost’s Distinguished Achievement in Research award (2018) and the James S. Ruby Faculty Appreciation Award from the Georgetown University Alumni Association (2023).

Adam’s most recent book is Facing Georgetown’s History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, which he co-edited with Elsa Barraza Mendoza. Published by Georgetown University Press in 2021, Facing Georgetown’s Historyis a collection of primary sources, essays by scholars, and articles by journalists that document Georgetown’s history of slavery and the school’s recent efforts to confront that past. Adam served on Georgetown’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation in 2015-2016, and is currently the principal curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive.

Adam is also the author of Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2015). The book tells the story of three slave children who were taken from New Orleans to Cuba by their owner during the U.S. Civil War, and their mother’s effort to recover them. Beyond Freedom’s Reach was named a Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. It also received the Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum, and the Margaret T. Lane/Virginia F. Saunders Memorial Research Award from the Government Documents Roundtable of the American Library Association.

Adam’s first book was Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Harvard University Press, 2005). In 2007, he co-authored Major Problems in Atlantic History (Houghton Mifflin) with his colleague Alison Games.