E. Douglas Bomberger is a Professor of Music at Elizabethtown College. His research examines such topics as the cosmopolitan style in nineteenth-century American music; the influential American Composers’ Concert movement of the 1880s; and America’s preeminent nineteenth-century composer, Edward MacDowell. He recently published a biography of the music publisher and philanthropist Theodore Presser (1848–1925).

Richard Benjamin Crosby is an Associate Professor of Speech in the English Department of Brigham Young University. His research focuses on civil-religious rhetoric in the United States. He is also interested in the way minority religious groups find and maintain footholds in an unaccommodating culture. Currently he is working on a monograph that examines the rhetorical history and significance of the Washington National Cathedral.

Carolyn Eastman is an Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research explores the ways that men and women in the past interacted with politics and cultural notions of belonging and exclusion via the media of writing, oratory, and visual images. Her prizewinning book A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution was published in 2009 by the University of Chicago Press.

Granville Ganter is an Associate Professor of English at St. John’s University. His research centers on oratory, rhetoric, and performance from the colonial period through the Civil War, and he has published on such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Anne Laura Clarke. He is the editor of The Collected Speeches of Sagoyewatha, or Red Jacket (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006).

Sara E. Lampert is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Dakota. Her work explores women’s and gender history in the early United States, with particular attention to popular entertainment and women’s changing relationship with public life in the nineteenth century. She recently completed a book manuscript about female celebrity and the transformations of American theater and culture between 1790 and 1850.

Kaitlyn G. Patia is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Studies at Whitman College. Her research examines the role of rhetoric in social change, focusing primarily on historical efforts by politically marginalized groups to create a more just world. She is currently working on a monograph about the rhetoric and activism of W. E. B. Du Bois and Jane Addams.

Angela G. Ray is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on rhetorical criticism and history, emphasizing popular media, education, and social reform in the nineteenth-century United States. Her award-winning book The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States was published in 2005 by Michigan State University Press.

Bjørn F. Stillion Southard is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. His work investigates early U.S. public address, particularly discourses of race and law. His current work focuses on the “peculiar rhetoric” of white and black supporters of the African colonization movement.

Paul Stob is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University. His research investigates the intersection of rhetoric and intellectual culture, paying particular attention to public lecturing in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He is the author of William James and the Art of Popular Statement, published in 2013 by Michigan State University Press.

Scott R. Stroud is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research concerns various ways that diverse cultures and thinkers have integrated rhetorical means into schemes of moral improvement. His is the author of John Dewey and the Artful Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011) and Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).

Kirt H. Wilson is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University. He has published widely in the areas of African American public discourse, nineteenth-century political communication, the civil rights movement, memory, and public deliberation. He is the author of The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002).

Tom F. Wright is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Sussex, England, specializing in nineteenth-century writing and cultural history. He is the editor of The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) and the author of Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Mary Saracino Zboray is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on antebellum cultural history and nineteenth-century literary culture. She has authored four books with Ronald J. Zboray: A Handbook for the Study of Book History in the United States (Washington, DC: Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 2000), Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book (New York: Routledge, 2005), Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), and Voices without Votes: Women and Politics in Antebellum New England (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010).

Ronald J. Zboray is a Professor of Communication and Director of Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His research investigates the intersections of print media production, distribution, and reception. In addition to the books authored with Mary Saracino Zboray, he is author of A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). The Zborays have coedited U.S. Popular Print Culture to 1860, volume 5 of The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), and they are working on a monograph entitled The Bullet in the Book: Volumes that Saved Civil War Soldiers’ Lives.

— Contributor information posted May 2019.