Gavin Jones is Professor of English at Stanford University, where he currently serves as department Chair. A former Junior Fellow in Harvard University's Society of Fellows, Jones is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (1999) and American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in US Literature, 1840 1945 (2007). He has published numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature in journals such as American Literary History, African American Review and New England Quarterly.