Northern Illinois University
Department of History
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Current Research

A Distinguished Research Professor, Aaron Fogleman is the author of Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), Jesus Is Female: Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), and Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple's Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), which won the 2014 Rawley Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in Atlantic History. He is co-author with Robert Hanserd of Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2022). The latter is a collection of published accounts in numerous languages by African slave ship survivors. Each entry contains a short biography, a URL to the full text, and a complete edition history of the text.

Professor Fogleman has published articles in the Journal of American History, William and Mary Quarterly, Atlantic Studies, Historische Anthropologie, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History, Pietismus und Neuzeit, Georgia Historical Quarterly and other journals, as well as in a number of essay collections.

Professor Fogleman has lectured in Europe and numerous places in North America. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018-19 and held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany in 2008-09. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, Germany in 1996-97 and 1999, and from 1991 to 2002 he taught at the University of South Alabama in Mobile.

He has had the pleasure and honor to direct numerous dissertations, and his former students teach and conduct research at, among other institutions, the University of Iowa, the College of William and Mary, Columbia College in Chicago, South Carolina State University, Concordia College (NE), and as a historian for the federal government. His former students have published their revised dissertations at Cornell University Press, the University of Georgia Press, and Routledge, as well as articles with Atlantic Studies, Early American Studies, the Florida Historical Quarterly, Ethnohistory, the North Carolina Historical Review, and other journals. Many of his MA students have received funding in major Ph.D. programs.

Professor Fogleman regularly reviews books, manuscripts, and grant proposals for international journals, presses and grant agencies.

Currently, he is working on a monograph entitled "Immigrant Voices: European and African Stories of Freedom, Unfreedom, and Identity through Four Centuries of Transatlantic Migrations to the Americas," which was funded by a Guggenheim Foundation research fellowship. Further, he and Robert Hanserd are working on a website for Five Hundred African Voices that will interface with others on transatlantic slavery.

Major Publications

Books

• with Robert Hanserd, Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2022.
• Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple’s Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
• Jesus Is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
• Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Select Articles/Book Chapters

• “Ideologies of the Age of Revolution and Emancipation in Enslaved African Narratives,” in Sophie White and Trevor Burnard (eds.), Hearing Enslaved Voices: African and Indian Slave Testimony in Britishand French America, 1700-1848 (New York: Routledge, 2020), 145-164.
• “The United States and the Transformation of Transatlantic Migration during the Age of Revolution and Emancipation,” in Michael Zuckerman and Patrick Spero, eds., The American Revolution Reborn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, 251-269 and 387-390.
• "The Transformation of the Atlantic World, 1776-1867," Atlantic Studies, 6:1, April 2009, 5-28.
• "Jesus Is Female: The Moravian Challenge in the German Communities of British North America," The William and Mary Quarterly, 60 (April 2003): 295-332.
• "From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the American Revolution," The Journal of American History,85 (1998): 43-76.

Teaching Interests

Professor Fogleman teaches courses in early America and the history of the Atlantic World., The first examines Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans primarily in eastern North America from early colonization until the early 19th century. Of special interest here is identifying the kind of colonial society that developed up to the mid-18th century and then the nature of change that occurred thereafter as a result of the American Revolution. His courses on the Atlantic World, 1492-1867, investigate the world made by encounters among Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans on all four Atlantic continents and the ocean in between.

Courses Taught

• HIST 260 American History to 1865
• HIST 261 American History since 1865
• HIST 395 Historical Methods
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• HIST 461/561 The American Revolution
• HIST 488/588 Transatlantic Slavery, 1492-1867
• HIST 495 Senior Thesis
• HIST 690 Reading Seminar in the History of the Atlantic World, 1492-1867
• HIST 790 Research Seminar in the History of the Atlantic World, 1492-1867

Interdisciplinary Affiliations

Affiliate, Latino/Latin American Studies Center

History, Culture and Politics Discussion Group

Prof. Fogleman co-directs a new faculty-graduate student discussion group that addresses the political agendas of uses and abuses of history throughout the world historically and today. See below for semester schedules: 

Fall 2023     

Spring 2024    pending