Rate My Professor Joshua Rothman

Joshua D. Rothman is Professor of History and Interim Associate Provost for Academic and Administrative Affairs at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He earned his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2000. Rothman previously served as Chair of the Department of History from August 2016 to August 2025 and has been appointed as the Provost’s Faculty Fellow for the 2025-2026 academic year. His research interests encompass race and slavery, Southern history, nineteenth-century America, and the history of capitalism. Rothman's expertise also includes social and cultural history, with a focus on the domestic slave trade, economic speculation, and interracial families in the antebellum South.

Rothman has authored several influential books that have reshaped understandings of slavery's role in American capitalism. His most recent work, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America (Basic Books, 2021), earned recognition as a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Book Prize from the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery and the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize from the Journal of Global Slavery. Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (University of Georgia Press, 2012) received the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association and the Michael V.R. Thomason Book Award from the Gulf South Historical Association. Earlier publications include Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) and Reforming America, 1815-1860: A Norton Documents Reader (W.W. Norton, 2010). Forthcoming is A Pioneer in the Cause of Freedom: The Life of Elisha Tyson (University of Georgia Press, 2025). He has published peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals such as the Journal of Southern History, Journal of American History, and Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation. Rothman has held numerous distinguished fellowships, including the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2019-2020), Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition Fellowships from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University (2015-2016 and 2008-2009), and fellowships from the Huntington Library, Library Company of Philadelphia, Historic New Orleans Collection, and American Philosophical Society (all 2015-2016). He is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. Through his scholarship, Rothman has significantly influenced the fields of Southern and economic history by illuminating the mechanisms of the domestic slave trade and its broader implications for American society.