Caroline Levander is the vice provost for interdisciplinary initiatives, 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.