Salamishah Tillet received her B.A. in English and Afro-American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (1996) and her M.A.T. in English Education from Brown University (1997). She earned her A.M. in English and American Literature in 2002 and her Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University in 2007. Her manuscript titled "Peculiar Memories: Slavery and the Post-Civil Rights Imagination" examines how contemporary African-American artists and writers reconstruct "sites of slavery" as a metaphor for their post-Civil Rights political identities. Her research interests include twentieth-century African-American literature and visual and performance arts, cultural studies, and feminism.