Martha Hodes, Professor of History at New York University, is the author most recently of Mourning Lincoln (Yale University Press), winner of the Lincoln Book Prize, and selected as an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times Book Review, a Best Book of 2015 by the Wall Street Journal, and one of ten long-list finalists for the National Book Award. She is also the author of two more award-winning books, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (W.W. Norton) and White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (Yale University Press).

Hodes has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, Harvard University, the Fulbright Commission, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Whiting Foundation. She is an elected lifetime fellow of the Society of American Historians, an organization devoted to distinguished historical writing, and holds degrees from Bowdoin College, Harvard University, and Princeton University.

At NYU, Hodes teaches courses on race, the Civil War, and the 19th-century United States, as well as courses devoted to the craft of history-writing, including History and Storytelling, Reconstructing Lives, Biography as History, Autobiography and History, and Reading and Writing Experimental History.

She is currently writing a book, under contract with HarperCollins, exploring history and memory through a 1970 airplane hijacking, in which she was a 12-year-old passenger held hostage in the Jordan desert for a week.