Alisha Gaines is the Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of English at Florida State University. Her first manuscript, Black for a Day: Fantasies of Race and Empathy, was published with University of North Carolina Press (Spring 2017). The project rethinks the political consequences of empathy by examining mid-to-late twentieth and twenty-first century narratives of racial impersonation enabled by the spurious alibi of racial reconciliation and empathy. Black for a Day constructs a genealogy of white liberals who temporarily “become” Black. Her next book project is about memory, public history, and transatlantic “slave play.”