Joseph Rezek received his PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his B. A. from Columbia University. He was the Barra Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania. His area of expertise is British and American literature from 1750 to 1850, and his research focuses on book history, the circulation of texts, and the distribution of cultural capital in the Atlantic world. In addition to the McNeil Center, he has received grants and fellowships from the Library Company of Philadelphia, The Huntington Library, and the Keats-Shelly Association of America. He has taught at UCLA and New York University, and his work on black Atlantic print culture is forthcoming in the journal Early American Literature.