Contributors

Philip Derbesy is a lecturer in the Program in Technical Communication at the University of Michigan and the author of several articles and book chapters on literary identification, Beat literature, cinematic allusions, and religion and literature. He is currently writing a book titled “Reading Cinematic Allusions in the American Novel” about film’s influence on the American novel.

Ryan Ku is a visiting assistant professor of English literature at Swarthmore College and the author of an entry on Gina Apostol in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 1980–2020 (John Wiley and Sons, 2022). He has also published articles in Kritika Kultura and American Imago and is currently writing a book titled “War Reality: Novel Histories of Asia/America.”

Cameron Leader-Picone is a professor in the Department of English at Kansas State University and the author of Black and More than Black: African American Fiction in the Post Era (UP of Mississippi, 2019). He has also published in MELUS and in a prior issue of Contemporary Literature. Cameron is currently completing a manuscript, “Afropolitanism and New African Diasporic Literature in the United States,” under contract with Northwestern University Press.

Laura Savu Walker is an adjunct professor at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. She is the author of Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narratives (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2009) and the editor of The Good Life and the Greater Good (Lexington Books, 2015). She has also written several articles and book chapters. Laura’s current project is an examination of Charlotte McConaghy’s environmental novels Migrations and Once There Were Wolves through the lens of flat ontology.

Jessica Swoboda is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Virginia and the author of “Afterword: How We Argue” in a special issue of Textual Practice that discusses the future of literary studies. She has also written several essays for The Point magazine and is a cohost of the magazine’s podcast.

Robert Baskin is a PhD candidate at Boston College. His forthcoming dissertation discusses the legacy of aestheticism in transatlantic weird fiction and high modernism and its relation to reactionary politics.

Megan Faragher is a professor of English at Wright State University. She is the author of Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature: The Psychographic Turn (Oxford UP, 2021) and a coeditor, with Melissa Dinsman and Ravenel Richardson, of Mid-Century Women’s Writing: Disrupting the Public/Private Divide (Manchester UP, 2024).