Contributor Biographies
- Contributor Biographies
Jennifer J. Baker is associate professor of English at New York University, where she specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and intellectual history. She is the author of Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Johns Hopkins, 2005) and is currently writing a book on American romanticism and the Victorian life sciences.
Alex W. Black is a postdoctoral fellow of African American literature in the department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His first book project is a study of the print and performance cultures of the nineteenth-century antislavery movement in the United States. His work has appeared in American Quarterly and the Modern Language Association’s Options for Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War.
Hester Blum is associate professor of English at Penn State University. She is the author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), which received the John Gardner Maritime Research Award, and the editor of William Ray’s Barbary narrative Horrors of Slavery (Rutgers University Press, 2008). She recently edited a special issue of Atlantic Studies on “Oceanic Studies” (10:2, 2013) and a volume of essays entitled Turns of Event: American Literary Studies in Motion. Blum is writing a book about oceanic studies and the literary cultures of polar exploration called “The News at the Ends of the Earth.”
Colleen Glenney Boggs is professor of English and women’s and gender studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773–1892 (Routledge, 2007) and Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity (Columbia University Press, 2013). Her edited volume Options for Teaching the Literatures of the [End Page 213] American Civil War is forthcoming with the Modern Language Association. Her essay here is drawn from her monograph-in-progress, “Civil War Substitutes: How the Military Draft Changed American Literature.”
Richard J. Callahan, Jr. is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Missouri and author of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust (Indiana University Press, 2009). He is currently working on a religious history of nineteenth-century American whaling.
Ryan Carr is a PhD candidate in English at Yale University. His next article, “Expressive Enlightenment: Subjectivity and Solidarity in Daniel Brinton, Franz Boas, and Carlos Montezuma,” will be published in the collection Indigenous Visions, edited by Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner (Yale University Press, 2015).
Irene Cheng is assistant professor of architecture at the California College of the Arts. She is the co-editor of The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century (New York: The Monacelli Press and Columbia Books of Architecture, 2003) and is currently working on a book on utopian architecture in nineteenth-century America.
Brigitte Fielder is assistant professor of comparative literature and folklore studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently working on two book projects. “Kinfullness: White Womanhood and Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century American Literatures” demonstrates how interracial kinship refigures expectations for white woman characters in nineteenth-century narratives of domesticity, heterosexuality, nationalism, abolitionism, and racial uplift, eschewing notions of racial exclusion or purity in favor of models of national multiracial family. “Animal Humanism: Species, Race, and Humanity in the Long Nineteenth Century” reads overlapping discourses of race and species to show not only the limitations of interracial or interspecies relations but also to suggest possibilities for affective relations that are not dependent upon sameness, but which might be mediated through acknowledged positions of difference. Essays from each of these projects have appeared in Studies in American Fiction and American Quarterly. She has received research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Animals and Society Institute/Wesleyan University Animal Studies.
Jason Ānanda Josephson is chair and associate professor of religion, Williams College. Josephson received his PhD in religious studies from Stanford University in 2006 and has held visiting [End Page 214] positions at Princeton University, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, Paris, and Ruhr Universität, Germany. He is the author of numerous articles/book chapters, short translations, and one monograph, The Invention...
