CONTRIBUTORS

2 0 6 Y C O N T R I B U T O R S LOUISE BERNARD is curator of Prose and Drama for the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and a senior research fellow in the department of African American studies. She previously served as an assistant professor of English at Georgetown University. Her work has appeared in Black Camera, African American Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Black Renaissance /Renaissance Noire, The Dictionary for Literary Biography: Contemporary Black British Writers, and the Washington Post. At the Beinecke she has curated several exhibitions, including ‘‘Doonesbury in a Time of War,’’ and most recently the cocurated exhibitons ‘‘Psyche and Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul’’ and ‘‘Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection of American Literature, 1911–2011.’’ She is working on a book-length project, ‘‘A Life of the Mind: Race, Writing, and American Democracy,’’ which considers the role of African American writers as public intellectuals during the cold war period. DAVID W. BLIGHT is Class of ’54 Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. He teaches a lecture course, ‘‘The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1840s–1877,’’ which is available online as one of Yale’s popular ‘‘Open Courses.’’ He is the author or editor of many books, including Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped from Slavery, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation; and American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (published this year). He has edited teaching editions of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and is now at work on a full biography of Frederick Douglass for Simon and Schuster. LESLIE BRISMAN is Karl Young Professor of English at Yale, where he teaches courses on Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Romantic and Victorian poetry, Freud, and the Bible. His special concerns include the way figures of genius in all ages have risen above historical circumstance and reference in conversation with their great precursors . He is the author of Milton’s Poetry of Choice (1973), Romantic Origins (1978), and The Voice of Jacob (1990). His recent scholarship and publication is mostly in biblical studies. J.D. CONNOR came to Yale in 2009. He teaches film and media history in history of art and the film studies program, and is currently finishing The Studios After the Studios: Hollywood in the Neoclassical Era, 1970–2010. He has published work on subjectsasdi √erentasthetrailerforWherethe Wild Things Are (post45.org) and the avant-garde filmmaker Owen Land (in the journal Adaptation). He is also at work on a history of tape recording called Voiceover. He serves on the steering committee of Post45, a group of American culture specialists which celebrated its fifth anniversary with a conference at the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. RICHARD DEMING is a poet and a theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. His collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman), received the Norma 2 0 7 R Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His poems have appeared in such places as Sulfur, Field, Indiana Review, and The Nation. He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford). He teaches at Yale University. ROBERTA FRANK, Marie Borro√ Professor of English, teaches Old English and Old Norse language and literature at Yale, and (with a colleague in history) a large and lively lecture course on the Vikings. She has written on the intricate poetry of the skalds and is currently completing a book on early Northern aesthetics. Essays include : ‘‘Beowulf and Sutton Hoo: The Odd Couple,’’ ‘‘Interdisciplinary: The First HalfCentury ,’’ ‘‘The Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet,’’ ‘‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Philologist,’’ ‘‘The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet,’’ ‘‘The Discreet Charm of the Old English Weak Adjective,’’ ‘‘The Incomparable Wryness of Old English Poetry,’’ and (the most recent) ‘‘Siegfried andArminius...