Susanna Ashton is professor of English at Clemson University. An expert on slavery and freedom narratives, she was a Du Bois fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center, a fellow with Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center, and a Fulbright scholar. The author of Collaborators in Literary America, 1870–1920 and A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin (The New Press), she lives in Clemson, South Carolina.