David Zimmerman is Ritzmann Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowdsin American Fiction (University of North Carolina, 2006), and his essays have appeared in American Literary History, American Literature,…

Rhondda Robinson Thomas is an associate professor of English at Clemson University where she teaches early African American literature and American literature. She has published Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro-Atlantic Identity, 1770-1903, co-edited the anthology titled The South…

Brook Thomas recently–and happily–retired as a  Chancellor’s Professor (Center in Law, Society, and Culture) at the University of California-Irvine. Prof. Thomas has written many books and articles about the relation between US law, literature, and history, most recently The Literature of…

Eric Gardner’s teaching and learning interests center on a range of issues in African American literature and culture as well as methods for literary study, with emphasis on the praxis of literary history. After taking his doctorate at the University…

Elizabeth Renker is the author of the forthcoming Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1911 (Oxford UP, 2018); The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History (Cambridge, 2007); and Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing…