Saidiya Hartman is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University. Professor Hartman is author of numerous articles and books, including Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford UP, 1997) and her most recent book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). Her forthcoming book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) confronts the disturbing relationships among memory, representation, and narrative. Weaving her own biography into an imaginative historical construction, she explores and evokes the non-spaces of black experience—the experience through which the African captive became a slave, became a non-person, became alienated from personhood.