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
Soul: A Brief History of Black Cultural Life is forthcoming from Yale University Press (2026). 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'm also at work on a new book project on Black humanity.
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. (2024). African American Literature’s One Long Memory. In J. Ernest (Ed.), Cambridge Companion to Race and American Literature (pp. 88-101). (Cambridge Companions to Literature).. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108891189.008
Freeburg, C. (2024). Review of Jesse McCarthy's The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War. Critical Inquiry.
Freeburg, C. (2023). Neo Slave Imaginaries. In Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature (pp. 115-127).
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