I am Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, with wide interests in 19th-century American literature and culture and a particular fascination with the life and work of Frederick Douglass. My 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). I am the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature and past winner of Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships. My new book, “After Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Quest for Interracial Democracy,” will be published by W. W. Norton in September 2026.