Research Interests
American and African American Literature; The Idea of Black Culture; The American Novel after 1850; Slavery in the Atlantic World; Media Aesthetics
Education
University of Chicago, Ph.D. 2006
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, English
Professor, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Work in Progress
The Book of Black Culture is nearly finished and will be published by Yale University Press. This book tells the story of how enslaved Africans and their descendants transformed America’s infamous failure into the greatest moral occasion of modern Western life.
I've begun writing a new book called Freedom Acts. Freedom Acts reimagines the problem of objectification across African American literature.
Highlighted Publications
Freeburg, C. C. (2021). Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012962
Freeburg, C. C. (2017). Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life. University of Virginia Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1v2xttp
Freeburg, C. (2012). Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century America. (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139135344
Recent Publications
Freeburg, C. C. (2021). Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012962
Freeburg, C. (2019). Pip and the Sounds of Blackness in Moby-Dick. In C. Marrs (Ed.), The New Melville Studies (pp. 42-52). (Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108646383.004
Freeburg, C. C. (2017). Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life. University of Virginia Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1v2xttp
Freeburg, C. C. (2016). Review: M. Awkward's Philadephia Freedoms: Black American Trauma, Memory, and Culture after King. ALH Online Review, Series V.
Freeburg, C. (2015). Baldwin and the Occasion of Love. In M. Elam (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (pp. 180-193). (Cambridge Companions to Literature). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781107337725.013