About

Martha Hodes is Professor of History at New York University, and served as Interim Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library from 2021 to 2023. She has taught as a Fulbright scholar in Germany and as a Visiting Professor at Princeton University. In addition to My Hijacking, she is the author of three books: Mourning Lincoln, winner of the Lincoln Prize of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, a longlist finalist for the National Book Award, a Wall Street Journal best book of the year, and a New York Times Editor’s Choice; The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century, a finalist for the Lincoln Book Prize; and White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, winner of the Allan Nevins Prize for Literary Distinction in the Writing of History.

At NYU, Martha teaches courses on race, the Civil War, and the nineteenth-century United States, as well as courses devoted to the craft of history-writing, including History and Storytelling, Autobiography and History, Biography and History, Reconstructing Lives, and Experimental History. She is a winner of NYU’s Golden Dozen Teaching Award.

Martha holds degrees from Bowdoin College, Harvard University, and Princeton University, and has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Whiting Foundation. She is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians.

She has presented her scholarship across the United States, in Europe, and in Australia, speaking at universities and colleges, high schools and elementary schools, historical societies, libraries, museums, and literary festivals, and serves as a consultant for documentaries, television and radio shows, and museum exhibitions on many aspects of American history.

Featured Work

My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering

2023
My Hijacking book cover

A historian offers a personal look at the fallibilities of memory and the lingering impact of trauma, as she goes back fifty years to tell the story of being a passenger—and a hostage—on a hijacked airliner.
On September 6, 1970, twelve-year-old Martha Hodes and her thirteen-year-old sister were flying home from Israel unaccompanied, when their plane was hijacked by the secular Marxist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Decades later, beginning with her own hazy memories, Hodes drew on her skills as a historian to re-create her week as a hostage in the Jordan desert. The experience, then and now, prompted her to learn about the lives and causes of her captors, pondering a deadly divide that continues today—and ultimately prompting a complex confrontation with trauma, childhood sorrows, and empathy.

Other Works

  • Mourning Lincoln

    2015

  • The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century

    2006

  • White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South

    1997

Awards and Recognition

  • John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
  • Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library
  • Harvard University, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History fellowship
  • National Endowment for the Humanities-Massachusetts Historical Society fellowship
  • Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library fellowship
  • National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship for University Teachers
  • American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
  • Whiting Foundation, Fellowship in the Humanities
  • Lincoln Prize, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
  • Allan Nevins Prize for Literary Distinction in the Writing of History, Society of American Historians
  • New York Institute for the Humanities, elected fellow
  • Society of American Historians, elected fellow
  • New York Academy of History, elected fellow

Press and Media Mentions