Russ Castronovo is Tom Paine Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published widely on American literature on topics such as democracy, citizenship, and aesthetics. He is author and editor of ten books, including most recently American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability (2023) and Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America (2014). He is co-editor of the journal American Literary History. Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland. His most recent books are The Lives of Frederick Douglass (2016), Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (2018), and The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson (2021). He has won NEH Fellowships and a Guggenheim. He is the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature.