History Lecture: "Only Murders in the Building"

Archival Crimes and The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts

Like a crime scene, the archives speak their violence. In this talk, Gregg Hecimovich, professor of English at Furman University, will demonstrate the forensic sleuthing he used to discover the identity of Hannah Crafts, the first Black woman to write a novel. As we will discuss, the archive is full of bloody secrets. But crimes can be repaired with care.

In 2023, Dr. Hecimovich cracked the case of Hannah Crafts, the mysterious author whose novel The Bondwoman’s Narrative became a New York Times Best Seller. His new work, The Columbia Seven (Simon and Schuster, 2027), discovers the lives behind some of the most controversial photographs of the nineteenth century. Hecimovich will show how to mend the archive so that we can continue to repair lives otherwise lost to us.

Sponsored by the Department of History and School of Arts & Sciences.