Jonathan Auerbach is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of numerous articles and books on American culture, including The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (Oxford University Press, 1989), Male Call: Becoming Jack London (Duke University Press, 1996), and Body Shots: Early Cinema's Incarnations, (University of California Press, 2007). He has recently completed a study entitled Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship.
Russ Castronovo is Jean Wall Bennett Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He is author of three books: Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (University of California Press, 1995); Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke University Press, 2001).