Scott Heerman

Bio

Scott Heerman serves as the Book Editor at the Omohundro Institute. Before coming to this role, he was an associate professor of history at the University of Miami, where he taught for a decade. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2013, where he worked with the late Ira Berlin. And for two years he was the Patrick Henry Scholar at Johns Hopkins University, where he was active in the Atlantic History program.

He is a scholar of slavery and emancipation in comparative perspectives, with a special emphasis on the law.  His first book The Alchemy of Slavery (2018) looked at the enslavement of Native and African-descended people in the Illinois country from the onset of French colonialism through the eve of the U.S. Civil War. His current project Freedom’s Ensemble examines the international abduction  of people into slavery across multiple empires, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. His articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, Law & History Review, William & Mary Quarterly, among others. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Faculty Fellowship, 2020 and Library Company of Philadelphia, 2018), The McNeil Center (Barra Sabbatical Fellow, 2023-24), and the Huntington Library (Barabara Thom Postdoctoral Fellow, 2016) and the American Historical Association (J. Franklin Jameson Fellow, 2014).