Caroline F. Levander is Carlson Professor in the Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, USA. She is author of Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (1998) and Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (2006); she is co-editor of The American Child: A Culture Studies Reader (2003), Hemispheric American Studies (2008), and Teaching and Studying the Americas (2010).

Robert S. Levine is Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, USA. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance (1989), Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997), and Dislocating Race and Nation (2008); he is also the editor of a number of volumes, including Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (2003), The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1820-1865 (2007), and Hemispheric American Studies (with Caroline F. Levander, 2008).