Caroline F. Levander is Carlson Professor in the Humanities, Professor of English, and Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and Digital Education at Rice University, USA. She is author of Hotel Life (with Matt Guterl, 2015), Where Is American Literature? (2013), 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 Distinguished University Professor of English 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), Dislocating Race and Nation (2008), and The Lives of Frederick Douglass (forthcoming); 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, 2012), and Hemispheric American Studies (with Caroline F. Levander, 2008).