Courses
“American Protest Literature,” “Nineteenth-Century American Novel,” “American Civil War,” “Ethnic-American Autobiography,” “Imagining Slavery,” “American Historical Novel,” “Douglass and Melville.”

Research Interests
American Literature and History
Antebellum and Civil War Era
Slavery and Abolition
Interracialism
Protest Literature
American Novel
Autobiography and Biography
Visual Culture (especially photography)

Books in Progress
“Frederick Douglass and the Dilemmas of Slave Redemptions,” The Ethics and Economics of Slave Redemption, eds.
Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, spring 2007).
“Frederick Douglass’ Self-Fashioning and the Making of a Representative Man,” in The Cambridge Companion to
African American Slave Narratives, ed. Audrey Fisch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, spring 2007).
Collective Degradation: Slavery and the Construction of Race, Co-Editor with Stanley Engerman (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2008).
“In the Shadow of a Dream: White Abolitionists and Race,” Collective Degradation: Slavery and the Construction of
Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
Imagining Equality: American Interracial Friendships, History and Myth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln: The Lives of Self-Made Men (New York: Warner Books, 2009).

Previous Books
The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform, Co-Editor with Steven Mintz
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007)
The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, Co-Editor with Timothy Patrick McCarthy
(New York: New Press, 2006).
Meteor of War: The John Brown Story, Co-Editor with Zoe Trodd (New York: Brandywine Press, 2004).
Editor, Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Modern Library, October 2003).
The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002).

Selected Articles, 1997-2006
“Slavery and the Legacies of the American Revolution,” The New York Sun, Arts Section, August 30, 2006.
“Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom,” Raritan, 25:1 (Summer 2005): 114-136.
“The Problem of Freedom in The Bondwoman's Narrative,” In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on
The Bondwoman's Narrative , eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Hollis Robbins (New York: Basic Books, 2004),
pp. 53-70.
“Popular Culture,” Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century , ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001).
“Advent Among the Indians,” Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999), pp. 236-273.
“Race and Contemporary Photography,” 21 st : The Journal of Contemporary Photography , Vol. 1 (1998).
“Daguerreotyping the National Soul: The Portraits of Southworth and Hawes, 1843-1860,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies , Vol. 22 (1997): 69-107.
Beyond Social Control: The Example of Gerrit Smith,” ATQ (American Transcendetal Quarterly) , 11:3 (September 1997): 233-259.

 Link to curriculum vitae

Last Updated: March 5, 2007