Russ Castronovo is is Dorothy Draheim Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (University of Chicago Press, 2007); Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke UP, 2001), and Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (University of California Press, 1996).