Jesse Alemán, Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, has published over a dozen articles. He has also edited Loreta Janeta Velazquez’s The Woman in Battle (2003), co‐edited Empire and the Literature of Sensation, with Shelley Streeby (2007), and co‐edited The Latino Nineteenth Century, with Rodrigo Lazo (2016).
Susan Belasco is Professor of English Emerita at the University of Nebraska‐Lincoln. The author of numerous essays on nineteenth‐century American literature, she is the editor or co‐editor of several works, including Stowe in Her Own Time (2009), “Whitman’s Periodical Poetry” for the Walt Whitman Archive, Periodical Literature in Nineteenth‐Century America, and the Bedford Anthology of American Literature.
Alfred Bendixen teaches at Princeton University and serves as the Executive Director of the American Literature Association. His most recent works include the Blackwell Companion to the American Novel (2012), The Cambridge History of American Poetry, co‐edited with Stephen Burt (2014), and The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture, co‐edited with Olivia Carr Edenfield (2017).
Cheryl Black is Professor of Theatre and Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair in Fine and Performing Arts at the University of Missouri and President of the American Theatre and Drama Society. She is the author of The Women of Provincetown, 1915–1922 (2002) and co‐editor of Experiments in Democracy: Interracial and Cross‐cultural Exchange in American Theatre, 1912–1945 (2016).
Philathia Bolton is an assistant professor of English at the University of Akron. She serves on the Advisory Committee for the Pan‐African Studies Program and is joint‐affiliated with the Women Studies Program. Her research interests involve women writers, the US Civil Rights movement, and critical race studies.
John C. Briggs, Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, is the author Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (2005) and Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (1989), which won the Thomas J. Wilson Award from Harvard University Press in 1988. He is president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writings, and since 2007 has been Director of the University Writing Program at UCR.
Donna Campbell, Professor of English at Washington State University, is the author of Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885–1915 (1997) and Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing (2016). Her other work on naturalism appears in numerous periodicals and volumes, including The Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011).
Cari M. Carpenter is a Professor of English at West Virginia University, where she is also a core member of the Native American Studies Committee. She is the author of Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians (2008) and the editor of The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864–1891 (2012).
Phyllis Cole, Professor Emerita of English at Penn State Brandywine, is the author of Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism (1998) and the co‐editor of Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism (2014). She is past president of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society and current president of the Margaret Fuller Society.
David O. Dowling is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. The latest of his six books are Emerson’s Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism’s Future (2014) and Surviving the Essex: The Afterlife of America’s Most Storied Shipwreck (2016).
Monika M. Elbert, Professor of English and Distinguished University Scholar at Montclair State University, has published widely on Nathaniel Hawthorne and on other nineteenth‐century American authors. The former editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, her recent books include several co‐edited collections and the edited volume Hawthorne in Context (2018).
Amanda Gailey is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska‐Lincoln, where she teaches courses on American literature and digital humanities. Her book, Proofs of Genius: Collected Editions from the American Revolution to the Digital Age (2015), examines how collections of works by American authors have helped shape understandings of American literature.
David Greven is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of several books, including Ghost Faces: Hollywood and Post‐Millennial Masculinity (2016), Gender Protest and Same‐Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature (2014), and The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender (2012).
Bill Hardwig, Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, is the author of Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900 (2013). His research interests include local color literature, periodical culture, and regional writers, from Mary N. Murfree to Cormac McCarthy.
Linck Johnson, Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Colgate University, is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, as well as Thoreau’s Complex Weave: The Writing of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” with the Text of the First Draft (1986). He is the co‐editor, with Susan Belasco, of the Bedford Anthology of American Literature.
Rochelle L. Johnson, Professor of English & Environmental Studies at The College of Idaho, is the author of Passions for Nature: Nineteenth‐Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienation (2009) and the editor of several works by or about Susan Fenimore Cooper. She also publishes on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, pedagogy, and the environmental humanities.
J. Gerald Kennedy, Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University, is the author or editor of 15 books, including the co‐edited The American Novel to 1870, volume 5 of the new Oxford History of the Novel in English (2014); and Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (2016).
Mary Klages, Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, specializes in Victorian American disability and gender studies. She is the author of Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America (1999) and Literary Theory: The Complete Guide (2016).
Andrew Levy, Cooper Chair in English at Butler University, is the author of Huck Finn’s America (2015), A Brain Wider Than the Sky (2010), The First Emancipator (2005), and The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (1993). His essays have appeared in Harper’s, The American Scholar, and Best American Essays.
Shirley Moody‐Turner, Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University, is the author of Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation (2013), the co‐editor of Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon (2013), and the editor of the forthcoming African American Literature in Transition: 1900–1910.
James Nagel is the Eidson Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia and president of the international Society for the Study of the American Short Story. The most recent of his numerous books are Race and Culture in Stories of New Orleans (2014) and The American Short Story Handbook (2015).
Nadia Nurhussein, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry (2013). She is currently at work on a book about the idea of Ethiopia in African American literature.
Venetria K. Patton is Head of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English and African American Studies at Purdue University. She is the author of The Grasp That Reaches Beyond the Grave: The Ancestral Call in Black Women’s Texts (2013) and Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction (2000).
Leland S. Person, Nathaniel P. Ropes Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, is the author or editor of eight books and dozens of articles on nineteenth‐century American literature, with emphasis on the writers Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and James Fenimore Cooper.
Elizabeth A. Petrino teaches American literature at Fairfield University. She is the author of Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: American Women’s Verse, 1820–1885 (1998) and the co‐editor, with Mary Louise Kete, of Reconsidering Lydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural Views (2016).
Alicia Mischa Renfroe is Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Her publications include an edition of Rebecca Harding Davis’s A Law Unto Herself (2014) and the introduction to the Signet Classic edition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (2015).
Anne Boyd Rioux, Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, is the author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (2016) and Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (2004).
Susan L. Roberson, Professor of English at Texas A&M University‐Kingsville, is the author of Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road (2011) and Emerson in His Sermons: A Man‐Made Self (1995). She is the editor of Women, America, and Movement: Narratives of Relocation (1998), Defining Travel: Diverse Visions (2001), and Essays Exploring the Global Caribbean (2013).
John Carlos Rowe, USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities at the University of Southern California, is the author of nine books, more than 150 essays and reviews, and editor or co‐editor of 10 books, including: Henry Adams and Henry James (1976), The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (1984), and The Other Henry James (1998).
Susan M. Ryan, Professor of English at the University of Louisville, is the author of The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (2003) and The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth‐Century Literary Marketplace (2016).
Shirley Samuels, Professor of English and American Studies at Cornell University, is the author of numerous articles and books, including Reading the American Novel, 1780–1865 (2012) and Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (2004). Research for her chapter was carried out when she was the Los Angeles Times fellow at the Henry E. Huntington Library.
Nicole Tonkovich is Professor of American Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She studies writing and photography by nineteenth‐century women, and is especially interested in issues of western expansion. Her most recent book is The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance (2012).
Edward Whitley, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University, is the author of American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (2010) and co‐editor, with Joanna Levin, of both Whitman among the Bohemians (2014) and Walt Whitman in Context (2018).