Rate My Professor Joshua Rothman

Joshua Rothman is a Professor of History and Interim Associate Provost for Academic and Administrative Affairs at the University of Alabama. He chaired the Department of History from August 2016 to August 2025 and was appointed Provost’s Faculty Fellow for the 2025-2026 academic year. Rothman earned his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2000. His research specializations include race and slavery, southern history, nineteenth-century America, and the history of capitalism. He has published extensively on these topics, contributing to scholarly understanding through books and articles in prominent journals.

Rothman authored The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America (Basic Books, 2021), Flush Times & Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (University of Georgia Press, 2012), Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), Reforming America, 1815-1860: a Norton Documents Reader (W.W. Norton, 2010), and the forthcoming A Pioneer in the Cause of Freedom: The Life of Elisha Tyson (University of Georgia Press, 2025). Selected articles include “The American Life of Jourdan Saunders, Slave Trader” in the Journal of Southern History (2022), “Franklin and Armfield Slave Sales in New Orleans, 1828-1836” in the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (2022), and “The Contours of Cotton Capitalism” in Slavery’s Capitalism (2016). His scholarship has earned the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize and finalist recognition for the Harriet Tubman Book Prize (2022), Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award (2013), American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2019-2020), Edna and Norman Freehling Fellow in South Atlantic Studies (Virginia Humanities, 2020), Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition Fellowship (Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale, 2015-2016 and 2008-2009), and fellowships from the Huntington Library, Library Company of Philadelphia, Historic New Orleans Collection, and American Philosophical Society. Rothman is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, co-directs Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from North American Slavery, and is researching the 1848 Pearl schooner escape attempt.