Shirley Samuels lives in Ithaca, New York. She teaches literature, history, and visual culture at Cornell University in the departments of English, Visual Studies, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies. Her books include Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War; Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865; Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation; and The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America. New books are the Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln and Reading the American Novel, 1790-1865. Reading the American Novel is a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2013. Follow her on twitter: @SRSamuels.