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SJ Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching focus on seventeenth and nineteenth-century archives, slavery, and marronage in the United States and the Caribbean. He is particularly interested in the resistance practices, flight from enslavement, and the contributions of Black and Native individuals in shaping textual and visual production during the colonial period. Zhang teaches transnational literary histories, exploring slave maroon narratives and the constructions of gender and race in various forms of bondage. His upcoming book project, titled 'Going Maroon Forms Family', examines the lives of individuals who chose to escape, the significance of kinship and chosen family, and the unexpected locations where maroons have established communities. He covers a range of themes from the history of slavery to contemporary representations of figures like Tituba from the Salem Witch Trials. His scholarly work contributes to the translation of historical Francophone Louisiana texts while intersecting with performance and storytelling modalities.
Department of Philosophy