Professor of English, Clemson University
Susanna Ashton is a Professor of English at Clemson University. She holds a B.A. from Vassar and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Among other awards, she has been a Faculty Fulbright scholar in Ireland; a Faculty fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; a Mark Twain Fellow for the Mark Twain Society; and held archival fellowships at the University of South Carolina, Emory University, and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. For 2021-2022, she was a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
Ashton has published peer-reviewed work on the topic of life writing written by enslaved people as well as scholarship on book history, authorship, anonymity, archival theory, libraries, copyright, studies of the novel, and American literary realism.
Her biography of John Andrew Jackson, _A Plausible Man. The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is published with NY: The New Press, 2024.
Her website and research webjournal, "The Runaway Chronicles" are available at www.susannaashton.com
ORCID #0000-0002-1652-2239