Anna Brickhouse teaches English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her books include Earthquake and the Invention of America (Oxford 2024), supported by a Guggenheim, The Unsettlement of America (Oxford 2014), awarded the MLA's Lowell prize, and Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge 2004). Susan Gillman teaches in the Literature Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books, published by the University of Chicago Press include Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (1989), Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003), honored by the MLA, and American Mediterraneans: A Study in Geography, History, and Race (2022).