Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania, received her Ph.D. from Boston University. Her teaching areas include African American literature and Southern literature with an emphasis on issue of race, region, and gender. Her research interests are interdisciplinary: geography and African American writers; photography and Southern women; film and literary modernism; visual culture and the Harlem Renaissance; civil rights law and narrative fiction. She is the author of Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature(2011), Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (2003), Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance (1994; paper 1996) and Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context (1982), and the editor of numerous reference texts, including the Penguin Classic editions of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1997) and Quicksand (2002), and the co-edited Satire or Evasion: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (1992). She is currently writing a monograph on Alice Walker for the Understnding Contemporary Authors Series, and serves as co-editor of the Gender and American Culture Series, University of North Carolina Press.