Lydia Fisher is a Postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, taught literature and writing courses at the University of Washington from 1994-2002. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. there. Her research and teaching interests include American literature, culture and history (specializing in the 19th and early 20th centuries), gender studies, science and literature, environmental studies, and theories of race and nation. She is currently working on a book project entitled Domesticating the Nation: American Literature, Exceptionalism, and the Science of Cultivation, which examines the stories that circulated in a young U.S. preoccupied with taming and perfecting land, animals, people, and nations.