Aida Levy-Hussen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation and co-editor of The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture. Working within and across the fields of African American and American literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical university studies, her current book project explores how and why racial passing has become a privileged subject in academia, literary fiction, and popular culture since the end of the twentieth century.