CHARLES F. ALTIERI is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Cornell University Press, 2003), Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1989), and many other books and articles.
DORRI BEAM recently published Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She is the author of a number of published and forthcoming essays, including “Transcendental Erotics, Same-Sex Desire, and Ethel’s Love-Life,” in a special issue of ESQ on women and transcendentalism, ed. Jana Argersinger and Phyllis Cole (2011); “Harriet Prescott Spofford and the Politics of Ornament,” in Ivy Wilson and Dana Luciano, eds., Unauthorized States: Antinomies of the Nation and Other Subversive Genealogies; and “Fuller, Women Writers, and Feminist Idealism,” in Brigitte Bailey and Conrad E. Wright, eds., Margaret Fuller and Her Circles.
NANCY BENTLEY is professor of English and chair of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of The Ethnography of Manners (Cambridge University Press, 1995), she recently published Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870–1920 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and is completing a book entitled “New World Kinship and the American Novel.”
EDWARD CAHILL is assistant professor of English at Fordham University, and has completed a book entitled Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). He has published essays in American Literature, Early American Literature, and elsewhere.
CHRISTOPHER CASTIGLIA is liberal arts research professor of English and senior scholar in the Center for American Literary Studies at Penn State University. He is the author of Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Duke University Press, 2008). He coedited Walt Whitman’s novel Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (Duke University Press, 2007), as well as a special issue of ESQ on new approaches to nineteenth-century American literature and sexuality. His new book, coauthored with Christopher Reed (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) is called If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past.
MAX CAVITCH is associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) as well as essays on a variety of topics in American Literary History, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Early American Literature, Senses of Cinema, Screen, Victorian Poetry, and numerous other journals and collections.
JULIE ELLISON is professor of American culture, English, and art and design at the University of Michigan, where she has taught since 1980. Her scholarly work focuses on two areas: transatlantic cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular emphasis on gender, genre, emotion, and politics, and, more recently, the impacts and implications of civic engagement in the production of cultural knowledge. The University of Chicago Press published her third book, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion, in 1999. Her articles have appeared in American Literature, Studies in Romanticism, American Literary History, Critical Inquiry, ELH, MLQ, and in a number of edited volumes. Ellison served as founding director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a consortium of ninety colleges and universities. Since 2003 she has worked on a number of collaborative projects with academics and artists in South Africa and Canada. She lectured in New Zealand as a Fulbright senior specialist in 2007.
MARY ESTEVE teaches in the English Department at Concordia University and is the author of The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003). She has published in American Literary History, ELH, and the Yale Journal of Criticism and is currently developing two research projects, one on narratives of redistribution in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, the other on the literary and cultural discourse of happiness and normativity in the mid twentieth century.
JONATHAN FREEDMAN is professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford University Press, 1990), The Temple of Culture: Assimilation, Aggression, and The Making of Literary Anglo-America (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2009).
DOROTHY J. HALE is professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stanford University Press, 1998) and The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900–2000 (Blackwell, 2006). “Aesthetics and the New Ethics” is part of her current book project, The Novel and the New Ethics. Additional work related to this new project includes “On Beauty as Beautiful? The Problem of Novelistic Aesthetics by way of Zadie Smith” (Contemporary Literature, forthcoming) as well as recently published essays in Narrative and The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel.
CHRISTOPHER LOOBY is professor of English and the director of the Americanist Research Colloquium at the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as president of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. He is the author of Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and he edited The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Recently he wrote an introduction for Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself (nyrb, 2009) and he coedited, with Christopher Castiglia, a special issue of ESQ on new approaches to nineteenth-century American literature and sexuality.
ERIC LOTT is professor of English at the University of Virginia. The author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford University Press, 1993) as well as The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (Basic Books, 2006), he is completing “Tangled Up in Blue: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism.”
TRISH LOUGHRAN is associate professor of English and history at the University of Illinois. She is the author of The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (Columbia University Press, 2007), which won the Oscar Kenshur Book Prize.
ELISA NEW is professor of English at Harvard University. Her books include The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (Harvard University Press, 1999), The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Jacob’s Cane: A Jewish Family’s Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore; A Memoir in Five Generations (Basic Books, 2009).
SIANNE NGAI is professor of English at Stanford University, and the author of Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005). She has completed Our Aesthetic Categories: The Zany, the Cute, and the Interesting (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
WENDY STEINER is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, past chair of the Penn English Department, and founder of the Penn Humanities Forum. Among her books on modern literature and visual art are The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Her cultural criticism has appeared widely in U.S. and UK papers. Most recently, Steiner has turned to multimedia opera, as librettist and producer of The Loathly Lady (2009; composer Paul Richards; artist John Kindness) and Biennale (in process; composer Paul Richards; artist Andrew Lucia).
CINDY WEINSTEIN is the author of The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1995) as well as Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2006). She coedited The Concise Companion to American Literature, 1900–1950 (Blackwell, 2008), edited The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and has published numerous essays in Leviathan, American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and elsewhere.
IVY G. WILSON is associate professor of English at Northwestern University and the author of Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S. (Oxford University Press, 2011) as well as recent articles in ESQ, Arizona Quarterly, and PMLA. His other work in U.S. literary studies includes The Works of James M. Whitfield: America and Other Writings by a Nineteenth-Century African American Poet, coedited with Robert S. Levine (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), and At the Dusk of Dawn: Selected Poetry and Prose of Albery Allson Whitman (Northeastern University Press, 2009).