Caroline Levander is the vice president for Global and Digital Strategy at Rice University, the Carlson Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Rice University. Her latest book is Hotel Life: The Story of a Place Where Anything Can Happen (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), and she is also writing Laying Claim: Imagining Empire on the U.S. Mexico Border (under contract, Oxford University Press). In addition to co-editing a book series, Imagining the Americas, with Oxford University Press, she has co-edited A Companion to American Literary Studies (2011), Teaching and Studying the Americas (2010), Hemispheric American Studies (2008), “The Global South and World Disorder” (2011) and The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (Rutgers University Press, 2003). She is author of Where is American Literature? (Wiley-Blackwells Manifesto Series, 2013), Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (Duke University, 2006) and Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (Cambridge University Press 1998 and reprinted paperback 2009). Professor Levander is a former director of Humanities Research Center at Rice University, and is also co-founder of the Americas Colloquium at Rice University and developed the Rice Americas Archive.