ESSAY (8D: Many a Saidiya Hartman work) Saidiya Hartman is a literary scholar, cultural historian, and a professor at Columbia University. Her work focuses on African American history and culture and on telling the stories of those whose lives have been sparsely documented and systematically excluded from historical archives. Her most recent book is titled Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019). In addition to her books, Saidiya Hartman has written ESSAYs (as this clue informs us) that have been published in a number of publications.