Janet Neary is an associate professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the author of Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives (Fordham University Press, 2017), essays in J19, ESQ, African American Literature, MELUS, and a variety of scholarly collections on African American literature and culture. She is the editor of Conditions of the Present: Selected Essays by Lindon Barrett (Duke University Press, 2018). She is currently at work on two books: Speculative Life: Nineteenth-Century African American Literature and Visual Culture of the West, which examines Black literature of Western migration in the wake of the California Gold Rush and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, and Misalliance: Race, Caste, and Empire in Print Culture of the Long Nineteenth Century, co-authored with Tanya Agathocleous.