Phillip Troutman

Phillip Troutman researches the visual cultures of American slavery and abolition. He is currently completing a book entitled “‘Incendiary Pictures’: The Radical Visual Rhetoric of Abolition,” and an article on the portrait work of Patrick Henry Reason (1816-1898), the first known African American engraver in New York City. He was a Smithsonian Institution Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of American History in 2018-19 and held a 2018 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend in support of this research.

Previous publications explore geopolitical literacy and sentimental rhetoric within slavery. Ongoing projects include a co-written article on the 1790s silhouette of Flora, a woman enslaved in Connecticut; a co-written article on abolitionist curation of artifacts of slavery during and after the Civil War; and an investigation into an 1847 proslavery riot at Columbian College—now GW. As faculty in the University Writing Program, he has published in Rhetoric Review and Prompt, with a focus on disciplinary discourse and pedagogy.

In 2022, he was awarded the Robert W. Kenny Prize for Innovation in Teaching of Introductory Courses.