The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation

Project Title: American Monument: The Kinship of Harriet and John Jacobs

ACADEMIC BIO
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a historian, literary critic, and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design; this year. In 2016, after receiving his PhD from Chicago, he rediscovered John Swanson Jacobs’s lost autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery, in an Australian archive. Republished by Chicago in 2024, profiled in the New York Times, Boston Globe, All Things Considered, and elsewhere, and awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for non-fiction, Schroeder’s edition returned this incredible narrative to America after 169 years, and is accompanied by the first full-length biography of Harriet Jacobs’s globe-circling brother, No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs.

Schroeder is also co-editor of Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn (Minnesota), and co-founder of Congress of the Birds, a wildlife rehabilitation center that annually rescues, rehabilitates, and releases more than 2,000 native and migratory birds. A recipient of long-term fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, and the American Antiquarian Society, he is now writing a full-scale biography of the Jacobs family, editing Lauren Berlant, A Reader (with Duke) and completing Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia (with Harvard).

CONGRESS OF THE BIRDS BIO
Jonathan Schroeder is co-founder of Congress of the Birds, a wildlife rehabilitation center that annually rescues, rehabilitates, and releases more than 2,000 of Rhode Island’s native and migratory birds. In his day job, he teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, and this year, he’s been fortunate enough to be a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. His most recent book, which returned a remarkable slave narrative called The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, to the world for the first time in 169 years, alongside a biography of its author, John Swanson Jacobs, was profiled in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and All Things Considered, and received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, given to works that best advance our understanding of racism and appreciation of diversity.