Notes on Contributors

Nancy Bentley is professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Ethnography of Manners (1995) and Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870–1920 (2009). She is currently working on a study of kinship and the novel in the Americas.

Michael Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in Literature and the director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent books are What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? (2006) and The Left at War (2009). He is also the editor of The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (2004).

Anna Brickhouse is associate professor of English and American studies at the University of Virginia, and the author of Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2004). She is currently completing a book on stories of failed translation and mistranslation in the Americas.

Russ Castronovo is the Dorothy Draheim Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Fathering the Nation (1995), Necro Citizenship (2001), and Beautiful Democracy (2007), and the editor of several volumes, including The Oxford Handbook to Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2011).

Matt Cohen is associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a contributing editor at the Walt Whitman Archive and the author of The Networked Universe: Communicating in Early New England (2009).

James H. Cox is associate professor of English and the director of the Indigenous Studies Graduate Portfolio at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions (2006) and Literary Revolutions: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico, 1920–1960 (forthcoming). He is also the coeditor of the journal Studies in American Indian Literatures.

Elizabeth Fenton is assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (2011).

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, professor of English, and director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor, or coeditor of over 40 books on American literature and culture, most recently the Library of America’s The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (2010). She is a founding editor of The Journal of Transnational American Studies.

Jennifer L. Fleissner is associate professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (2004) and of essays in such journals as Critical Inquiry, ELH, American Literary History, American Literature, and Novel.

Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney, Australia. His most recent books are Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion (2010) and The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011).

Susan Gillman teaches world literature and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (1989) and Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003), and coeditor (with Russ Castronovo) of States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (2009). She is currently completing a project on adaptation and translation in the Americas context titled “Our Mediterranean: American Adaptations, 1890–1975.”

Paul Gilmore is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and the author of The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (2001) and Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (2009). His articles have appeared in American Literature, ELH, MLQ, Early American Literature, and other journals and books.

Sean X. Goudie is associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and author of Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (2006), which was awarded the 2007 Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book. His current book project examines how the “Caribbean American region” became a primary locus for US empire building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Goudie is the director of Penn State’s Center for American Literary Studies (CALS), which recently hosted the inaugural conference of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (2001) and numerous essays on nineteenth-century print culture in English and Spanish. She is currently completing a book on the cultural history of Spanish usage in the United States.

George B. Handley is professor of humanities at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Postslavery Literatures in the Americas (2000) and New World Poetics (2007), and coeditor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2006) and Postcolonial Ecologies (2010). His articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Mississippi Quarterly, Callaloo, American Literature, and other journals and volumes.

Ursula K. Heise is professor of English and director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. Her major academic interests focus on environmental culture, literature and art in the Americas and Western Europe, and theories of modernization, postmodernization, and globalization. She is the author of Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (1997); Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008); and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (2010). She is working on an English version of Nach der Natur called Cultures of Extinction, and a new project provisionally titled “The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature.”

Gavin Jones is professor of English at Stanford University. His books include Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (1999); American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (2008); and an edition of Sylvester Judd’s 1845 novel Margaret (2009).

Catherine Gunther Kodat is professor of English and American Studies at Hamilton College. She has published widely on US literature, music, dance, and film in journals such as American Literary History, American Quarterly, Boston Review, and Representations. During the 1980s, she was the dance critic for The Baltimore Sun.

Caroline F. Levander is Carlson Professor of Humanities, professor of English, and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives at Rice University. She is the author of Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (1998) and Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (2006), and the coeditor of several volumes, including Teaching and Studying the Americas (2010).

Robert S. Levine is professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is the director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance (1989), Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997), and Dislocating Race and Nation (2008), and the editor of a number of volumes, including Hemispheric American Studies (coedited with Caroline F. Levander). He is the new general editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Mary Loeffelholz is professor of English and vice provost for academic affairs at Northeastern University. She is the author of Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory (1991) and From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2004); and her essays have appeared in American Literary History, English Literary History, The New England Quarterly, The Yale Journal of Criticism, and Studies in Romanticism, among other venues. She edited Studies in American Fiction from 1991 to 2008, and she is currently the editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume D, 1914–1945.

Christopher Looby is professor of English at UCLA and president of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. The author of Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (1996), he has also published The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1999) and prepared an edition of Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself (2008). He is currently working on a book called “The Sentiment of Sex.”

Colleen Lye is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses in American literature, Asian American Studies, and Critical Theory. She is the author of America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (2005), and coeditor with Christopher Bush of Forms of Asia, a special issue of Representations published in 2007.

John T. Matthews is professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of The Play of Faulkner’s Language (1982), The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner and the Lost Cause (1991), and William Faulkner: Seeing through the South (2009). He has written essays on a variety of other topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and British literature, and is the editor of Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900–1950 (2009).

Dana D. Nelson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches literature and American Studies. Her most recent book is Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People (2008). In her new book project, “Ugly Democracy,” she examines alternative democratic cultures and practices in the early nation, with an interest in their legacy and the possibilities they provide to democratic practice today.

Kirsten Ostherr is associate professor of English at Rice University, where she teaches courses in film and media studies and medical humanities. She is the author of Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (2005) and Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television, and Imaging Technologies (forthcoming), as well as articles on public health films, science fiction, animation, and independent art cinema.

Carla L. Peterson is professor of English at the University of Maryland, and affiliate faculty of the Departments of Women’s Studies, American Studies, and African-American Studies. She is the author of The Determined Reader: Gender and Culture in the Novel from Napoleon to Victoria (1986); “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (1995); and Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (2011). She has published numerous essays on nineteenth-century African American literature and culture.

Joel Pfister is Kenan Professor of the Humanities and chair of the Department of English at Wesleyan University. He has published six books, including The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction (1991); Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies (2006); and the coedited Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (1997). He is completing a book on American literature from Franklin to the modernists.

Jeffrey H. Richards (1948–2011) was for many years Old Dominion University Eminent Professor of English. He is the author of Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607–1789 (1991), Mercy Otis Warren (1995), and Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (2005), and the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of American Drama.

Mark Rifkin is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (2009) and When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (2011). He also coedited Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity: Rethinking the State at the Intersection of Native American and Queer Studies (2010), a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Ramón Saldívar is the Hoagland Family Professor in Humanities and Sciences and professor of English at Stanford University. He is the author of several books, including Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990) and The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (2006), which won the Modern Language Association Prize in 2007 for the best book in the area of US Latino/a and Chicana/o studies. Among his current projects is a book-length study titled “The TransAmerican Novel: Form, Race, and Narrative Theory in the Americas.”

Shirley Samuels is professor of English and American Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Romances of the Republic (1996) and Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (2004), and the editor of The Culture of Sentiment (1992) and Blackwell’s A Companion to American Fiction, 1780–1865 (2004).

Michelle Stephens is associate professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (2005) and a member of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective. She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled “Skin Acts: New World Black Male Performance and the Desire for Difference.” Her research and teaching interests include American, African American, Caribbean, and New World literatures; diaspora and cultural studies; black performance studies; and the intersections of race and psychoanalysis.

Elisa Tamarkin is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (2008). She is currently working on a book titled “Irrelevance,” on the culture of the news and on ideas of relevant and irrelevant knowledge since 1830.

Brook Thomas is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He has published books on James Joyce and on the New Historicism, and three on law and literature: Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (1987), American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (1997), and Civic Myths: A Law and Literature Approach to Citizenship (2007). He has also edited a casebook on Plessy v. Ferguson (1997).

Priscilla Wald is professor of English and Women Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995) and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2008), and coeditor (with Michael Elliott) of The American Novel: 1870–1940 (2011), volume 6 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English. She is currently at work on a book-length study titled “Human Being after Genocide: Toward a Genomic Creation Myth.”