Jill Shashaty received her PhD in American literature from Penn. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia and an occasional instructor in Penn's English department. She holds a B.A. in English from Georgetown University and a master's in social and environmental ethics from Vanderbilt University. Her dissertation, "As If: Utopian Desire and the Imagination of History in Antebellum America," investigates the utopian imagination as a dimension of antebellum historiography through case studies of James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Martin R. Delany, and Edward Bellamy. While her dissertation deals with American literature and culture of the long 19th century, her research and teaching extend into other fields as well: composition and pedagogy, environmental ethics and nature writing, American Indian literatures, James Joyce and Irish modernism, and theories of epistemology, genre, and ethics. Outside of teaching and research, she enjoys living in West Philly and caring for her three young children.