Lara Langer Cohen is an associate professor of English at Swarthmore College. She is the author of The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) and co-editor, with Jordan Alexander Stein, of Early African American Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Recent publications include essays on music in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, amateur journalism, mourning poetry, mid-nineteenth-century city mysteries, and summer jams. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Council of Learned Societies.