is a professor in the Department of History and the founding director of Georgetown’s . He studies 19th-century U.S. history with a focus on the history of slavery and emancipation.

Rothman is the author of Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South and Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery, which won the American Civil War Museum’s book prize . 

Here, he shares the books that have shaped his understanding of the past and why they matter today. 

What is a book that everyone should read?

Everyone — or at least everyone in the Georgetown community — should read The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church by Rachel L. Swarns. 

Swarns is the New York Times journalist who covered Georgetown’s ten years ago and traced the emergence of the and their developing relationship with the university and the Jesuits. In 2024, she published a book that explores the long, tangled history of the Jesuits, Georgetown and the enslaved families owned and sold by the Maryland Jesuits in 1838. As a historian of slavery at Georgetown, I’d be remiss not to recommend it. 

What is a book that you revisit every year?

Silencing The Past: Power and the Production of History by the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot is a perennial in my classes. 

I assign it to everyone from first-year undergraduates to doctoral students. Trouillot opens our eyes to how the stories we tell about history come to be, and what gets lost, neglected, omitted and suppressed in the process. It’s especially timely now for obvious reasons. At John Carroll Weekend in Philadelphia in 2025, and I led a walking tour of Independence National Historical Park that ended at an outdoor exhibit about slavery at the President’s House. The current administration has since ordered the National Park Service , and the exhibit remains subject to an between city and federal officials. Talk about silencing the past.   

What is a book that inspired your academic journey?

That’s a tough one because there are so many but I will say Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It, even though its subtitle is a little cringey today. The book was published in 1948, and I first read it in high school in the 1980s. Hofstadter was a brilliant historian and an elegant writer. His profiles of the leading political figures in American history are complex, ironic and counterintuitive. He made me want to study — I mean really study — history. 

What is the best new book that you’ve read in the past year?

Probably the novel Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, which actually came out in 2023. It tells the story of a family trying to get by in a country that is descending into authoritarianism, with people being kidnapped and disappeared off the street by the government. Like I said, it’s fiction.

What is the perfect book for the beach (or curled up in front of a fire, or down time, or…)?

Moby Dick, of course!

Her award-winning book, Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice, examines how racial identity, neighborhood and school environments can shape young people’s understanding of themselves and their place in society. 

Shedd shares the books that have influenced her teaching and continue to inspire her.

What is a book that everyone should read?

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins (1990) 

This book is a North Star for those seeking a model of how to use their unique biographies to generate and test foundational theoretical perspectives — “intersectionality” is Collins’ concept — and it is a perfect example of the “sociological imagination” we seek to ignite in our sociology students. Similar to the literary strategy of another shero of mine, Toni Morrison, Collins moves an often marginalized group, Black women, to the center of rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis. Everyone could benefit from the insights and analyses she offers in this work.

What is a book that you revisit every year?

The Supreme Court, Race, and Civil Rights by Abraham L. Davis and Barbara Luck Graham (1995)

This book has been with me for over twenty-five years, usually on my shelf at home. As an undergrad, I was a junior year domestic exchange student at Spelman College, and we were allowed to take classes at other schools in the Atlanta University Center Consortium. I was one of only two female students in Davis’ Race and Law class at Morehouse College, and this course changed my academic trajectory. 

Davis, who retired after 40 years on the faculty of that all-male institution, would call on me first every class session in his booming baritone: “Miss Smith College, give me the facts of [insert Supreme Court case here]!” He gave me a taste of the pressures and rewards that I now know first-year law students feel while taking Constitutional Law, and it might’ve been a big reason why I decided to pursue a doctorate in sociology instead. I now teach (sans the Socratic Method); this book’s coverage of landmark Supreme Court Civil Rights Cases is both informative and inspirational in our enduring struggle for equality in this country. 

What is a book that inspired your academic journey?

The Philadelphia Negro by W.E.B. Du Bois (1899) 

This is the book I was assigned my first year of graduate school that modeled how I could merge narratives, statistics and maps to present a fuller picture of sociological phenomena (e.g., my focus on adolescents’ educational experiences and contact with the criminal legal system). Although Du Bois has been installed to his proper place in the sociological canon in recent years, he researched and wrote this book while simultaneously navigating: 1.) immense disrespect in academia as the first African-American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University who wasn’t given a real professorship until he went to Atlanta University; 2.) scrutiny and skepticism from the Black residents of Philadelphia’s sixth ward whose lives he sought to examine empirically; and 3.) the resultant hesitation from his benefactors to accept Du Bois’ explanations of the challenges faced by this population because he connected them to an inequitable environment instead of the respondents’ personal failings.

What is the best new book that you’ve read in the past year?

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fannone Jeffers (2021)

I finally read the book this past year. It is a monumental debut work of fiction — it runs around 800 pages — by a poet who deftly weaves the life and words of Du Bois into the history, culture and experiences of one American family across centuries. Jeffers that she initially planned for this work to be short beach-read, but the stories just kept coming to her. I see this novel as a beautiful parallel to the non-fiction work I describe above, which is the closest I can get to a beach-read, without guilt. It centers on the central protagonist, Ailey Pearl Garfield, who is educated at a fictionalized HBCU similar to Spelman College and learns about her family and American society in her quest to become a historian. 

What books are you looking forward to reading?

Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster by Yuki Kato (2025) and The Undesirable Many: Black Women and Their Struggles against Displacement and Housing Insecurity in the Nation’s Capital by Rosemary Ndubuizu (2025)

I am super excited about new books by two of my colleagues in the ˝Ű×ÓĘÓƵ & Sciences. Gardens of Hope is the final book we’ll read in my Urban Inequality seminar this fall, and I can’t wait to discuss it with my students. It’s an account that centers the agency and collective efficacy shown by New Orleans residents in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. This narrative of hope and resilience is just the tone I need for closing out a semester of intense focus on unequal cities. 

The second book, The Undesirable Many, examines Black women’s tenant activism in DC via a Black feminist materialism framework that I have a feeling will reveal itself as the next iteration of scholarship that furthers the intellectual work of our academic forebears — Collins and Du Bois — mentioned above. It just all comes together. 

(All photos by Oxana Ware Photography)

Chemistry Professor Sarah Stoll is transforming the tiniest structures into big discoveries. As the principal investigator of the Stoll Research Group, she leads undergraduate and graduate students in better understanding magnetic nanoparticles, leading to advances in everything from targeted MRI contrast agents that are safer for individuals with kidney complications to new ways of storing and manipulating magnetic data. It has garnered her everything from a National Science Foundation CAREER Award — which recognizes exceptional potential in early-career faculty members — to being named a Sonneborn Chair for Interdisciplinary Collaboration at Georgetown. Here, she shares some of the books found in her office in Regents Hall that shaped her identity, calling and worldview.

What is a book that everyone should read?

Susan Solomon’s Solvable, which provides the history of six environmental challenges. At a time where there is so much “outrage fatigue,” this book has the urgency but not the alarm of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It is optimistic, identifies successes and is perfect for anyone who asks, “How did we get here, and how can we solve something as big as climate change?”

What is a book that inspired your academic journey?

I was a first-year student when I read Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table. It was significant in that it marked the moment that I knew being a chemist was part of my identity. Chemistry was the lens through which I learned about the world.

What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

It’d either be Alan Alda’s If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? or Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. The former is a great book about science communication and as someone who spends time carefully selecting my words, it made me pause to consider the role of nonverbal communication. The latter is a nonscientific text that expanded my understanding of what it means to be human.

What is a book you revisit every year?

I frequently return to The Second Law by Henry Bent. In addition to the importance that entropy has to chemistry and the environment, each chapter has a short history of an important scientist who contributed to thermodynamics, often in their own words, allowing Bent to not only humanize an abstract subject but unveil the observations and theories that over time form the cathedral we call thermodynamics.

#SHELFIE

Professor Susanna Lee is an internationally recognized specialist in the nineteenth-century French novel and twentieth-century crime fiction. Lee, who serves as chair of the , has a variety of research interests, including popular culture, literary theory and law and humanities. 

Lee’s first book, A World Abandoned by God, examined lived experiences of the secular world in nineteenth-century French and Russian narrative. She then wrote two books on hard-boiled detective fiction, a genre that emphasizes individualism and realism. studied French and American detectives as nationally specific culture heroes and models of spiritual authority. In , a “feisty alternative view of American history as seen through the lens of hard-boiled detective fiction,” Lee tells the story of the American twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through the nation’s ever-evolving love affair with the hard-boiled detective. True to her roots in the French canon, she also edited the Norton Critical Editions of and .

Now in her second year as convener of Georgetown’s , Lee continues to research the limits and possibilities of individual human agency. Most recently, she has co-edited, with , Regulating the Body, forthcoming in 2025, which analyzes the practices and discourses used to constrain bodily autonomy in American law. She is currently at work on a new book project, a cultural history of alcoholism in France.

What is a book that everyone should read?

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (Ă€ la recherche du temps perdu). Yes, it is long, but you will thank me — once you have read Proust, you have a friend for life. This novel has everything — incomparably beautiful writing, complicated and obsessive and memorable characters and a deep dive into human nature of all kinds. And it is funny. You can’t beat Proust when it comes to creating and making fun of characters who try too hard. I first came to Proust in graduate school fearing it would be a daunting slog, but not at all, he is amazing. 

What is a book that you revisit every year?

ąó±ô˛ąłÜ˛ú±đ°ůłŮ’s Madame Bovary, because every sentence is like a celebration of what words can do. He took seven years to write it and it is just one Easter egg after another. This is one of the books that made me decide to become a 19ľ±Ă¨łľľ±˛őłŮ±đ (to specialize in the 19th century) because of what Flaubert does with language and the way the characters are relatable and repulsive at the same time, so bold and so clueless.

What is a book that inspired your academic journey?

Both the books named above, also Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi and Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson. The first course I ever designed was an American literature course called “Hardboiled Crime Fiction;” we started with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and, while preparing that course, I discovered Jim Thompson. He looked like a patrician gentleman but the writing is some of the most unhinged material you’ll ever see, and it’s fascinating to see total moral rot combined with lively and poetic writing. Oddly enough, Pop. 1280 was made into a French movie, called Coup de Torchon, which the director chose to set in French-occupied West Africa, and there is a lot to say about that.  

What is the best new book that you’ve read in the past year?

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. So beautiful and moving. It’s about community and empathy and quiet, important lives, how we can save each other. To me it reads delicately, like lace filigree, even though all of human life is there, and when it’s over you just sit and marvel at what you just read.

What is the perfect book for the beach?

This is a tough one because I’m from Southern California and if we’re at the beach we’re in the water! But to answer the question — anything by English mystery writer Ruth Rendell, A Judgment in Stone or The Bridesmaid are great and both were made into French movies. Also French mystery writer Fred Vargas or American mystery writer Kellye Garrett. Ruth Rendell was prolific and incredible, she also wrote psychological thrillers under the name of Barbara Vine. Fred Vargas in some ways rejuvenated French crime fiction, and she has been writing amazing novels since the 1990s — email me for recommendations! Kellye Garrett’s Hollywood Homicide was so much fun to read, and cheered me during the pandemic — her latest is Missing White Woman. 

Photography by Oxana Ware (C’07, G’09).

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Professor Daniel Shore is a specialist in early modern literature whose research demands thoughtful engagement with some of the most important works in the English language. Since studying John Milton as a graduate student at Harvard, Shore has become an internationally recognized expert on the poet and his seminal work, Paradise Lost. Shore’s first book, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric, explored Milton’s development of novel rhetorical strategies amidst a widespread distrust of classical rhetoric in the 17th century. 

In addition to immersing himself in texts written hundreds of years ago, Shore’s research points to the future – he has published on both linguistics and the digital humanities. One of Shore’s projects, , is an interactive, collaborative, digital reconstruction of the Early Modern social network, built around the epicenter of philosopher Francis Bacon. His second book, Cyberformalism, presented a groundbreaking approach to understanding the history of language and culture with the help of growing digital archives and advanced search tools. 

Shore, who is in his second year serving as the chair of the Department of English, is currently working on two book projects: The Limits of Experience in the Seventeenth Century and Language After the Human. Though quite different in their aims and topics, both projects respond to a posthumanist movement away from the traditional human subject as the locus of knowledge and agency. We visited Shore’s office in New North to discuss his passion for books. 

What is a book that everyone should read?

Forgive me for being slippery, but there is no such book that “everyone” should read. The true pursuit is what Milton called “promiscuous” reading, and to that pursuit no single book can be essential. But also: Middlemarch by George Eliot.

What is a book that you revisit every year?

One of my teachers, Stephen Booth, described John Milton’s Paradise Lost as the greatest pleasure machine ever created by a single human being, and after teaching it for more than a decade I remain inclined to agree. Its pleasures range from the truly awesome scope of its subject matter – God’s creation in its entirety and the causes of human suffering – to the local eventfulness of each sentence, drawn out from one pentameter line into the next.  I try to teach and to introduce students to Milton’s epic whenever possible, and I am grateful for the chance to evangelize on its behalf here.

What is a book that inspired your academic journey?

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens made me want to devote my life to literature. As a young person I identified quite strongly with the protagonist, Pip, in ways that now baffle me. My identification was far from auspicious, since the great expectations of the title come to naught. Pray that my “academic journey” does not follow suit. 

What is the best new book that you’ve read in the past year?

After a period of dissatisfaction with contemporary novels, I found the first two books of Marlon James’ Darkstar Trilogy — Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King — vivid, experimental and enchanting. They locate fantasy in an imagined Africa just before the arrival of European slave traders.

What is the perfect book for the beach?

I sometimes try to read novels at the beach and usually fail. The brief, fragmentary essays of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia feel suitable. Read one, reflect on damaged life, stare at the sea.

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