Mary T. Freeman
Mary T. Freeman
Associate Professor of New England History
Office: 250 Stevens Hall
207.581.1914
Professor Freeman is on research leave for the 2025-2026 academic year.
I am a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, with a focus on political, social, and cultural history of slavery and abolition. Through teaching and public history work, I also explore abolitionism, African American history, and women’s and gender history in Maine and New England. I received my PhD from Columbia University, and my BA is from Williams College.
My first book, Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence, will be published by University of Pennsylvania Press in February 2026. I argue that correspondence enabled abolitionists to organize as a group and articulate radical ideas at a time when their ideas were excluded from mainstream electoral politics. Letter writing opened a space for people on the political fringes and disfranchised persons, especially African Americans and women, to claim a voice in national politics. In Spring 2023, I published an article titled “Seeking Abolition: Black Letter Writers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in the Era of Graduate Emancipation” in the Journal of the Early Republic. I am now developing research projects on nineteenth-century Black activism in Maine and on the history of abolitionist archives.
I teach undergraduate courses in the fields of Maine history, nineteenth-century U.S. history, African American history, and women’s and gender history. I also teach graduate courses and supervise MA and PhD students working in those fields. I am an affiliated faculty member in UMaine’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program.
I have a strong interest in public history. I give public talks about the history of slavery and abolition in Maine, consult with public institutions and media outlets about historical topics, and am active in various historical organizations and initiatives across the region. Since 2018, I have led the UMaine History Department’s partnership with Maine Historical society as the Faculty Advisor and Managing Editor for the Maine History journal.
Southern ideas of liberty. New method of assorting the mail, as practised by southern slave-holders, or attack on the post office, Charleston, S.C. (Boston, 1835), accessible online at https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/Islandora%3A65170.
Undergraduate Courses
HTY 210: History of Maine
HTY 232/WGS 201: Womanhood in America
HTY 310: Slavery, Politics, and Memory in American History
HTY 311: Research Seminar: Social Movements and Activism
HTY 415: African American History
HTY 463: The Early Republic, 1789-1840
Graduate Courses
HTY 599: Special Topics in History: Archives and Power
HTY 599: Special Topics in History: Slavery, Abolition, and Race in American
History
