Notes on Contributors

Paul Boyer The Merle Curti Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to United States History, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2001. The essay "Notes of a Disillusioned Lover: John Updike's Memories of the Ford Administration" will appear, together with a response by Updike, in Mark Carnes's edited collection Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other), forthcoming in 2001 from Simon & Schuster.

John M. Grammer Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of the South, he is the author of Pastoral and Politics in the Old South (LSU Press, 1996).

Oliver Harris He is a lecturer in American literature and film in the School of American Studies at Keele University, England. The editor of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-59 (1993), he has pub-lished articles on the Beats and has a book forthcoming on Burroughs.

Josephine Gattuso Hendin Professor of English and former Chair of the English Department at New York University, her works include The World of Flannery O'Connor (1970) and Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945 (1978). Her novel of Italian American life, The Right Thing to Do, won an American Book Award and was reprinted in October 1999 by The Feminist Press.

Michael P. Kramer Currently a member of the English Department at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, he taught for many years at the University of California, Davis. Author of Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (1992) and coeditor of the Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (forthcoming), he is currently at work on an edition of critical translations tentatively called "The Orthodox Jewish Sermon in America, 1880-1930" (with Menahem Blondheim) and a study of Jewish American thought and writing, "The Art of Assimilation."

Robert F. Reid-Pharr Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, he is the author of Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Black Gay Man (New York University Press, forthcoming).

Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, he writes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, and on American Jewish literature and culture.

Charles Scruggs Professor of American literature at the University of Arizona, he is the author of The Sage in Harlem: H. L. Mencken and the Black Writers of the 1920s (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) and the coauthor of Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). He has also written articles on Phillis Wheatley, Carl Van Vechten, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison.

Shelley Streeby She is Assistant Professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego. This essay is drawn from her forthcoming book, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture.