Phillip Troutman

Phillip Troutman is a historian researching the visual culture 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. Previous publications explore geopolitical literacy and sentimental rhetoric within slavery. Other current projects include a co-written article on “abolition curation”—the gathering and display of artifacts of slavery during the Civil War; a co-written article on the 1790s silhouette of Flora, an woman enslaved in Connecticut; and an investigation into an 1847 proslavery riot at Columbian College—now GW. His research has been supported in recent years by a National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Stipend and by a Smithsonian Institution Senior Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of American History. 

As Director of Writing in the Disciplines, he has presented with GW faculty from math, physics, speech and hearing, and engineering at national and international conferences in Sacramento, CA, Richmond, VA, and Antwerp, Belgium. His writing studies publications, including in Rhetoric Review and in Prompt, focus on disciplinary discourse and pedagogy. 

He serves as Faculty Guide for Fulbright Residence Hall, faculty advisor to the GW Cycling Team, and historian for GW’s chapter of The ΦBK Society. In 2022, he was awarded the Robert W. Kenny Prize for Innovation in Teaching of Introductory Courses.