Kenyon Gradert is an Assistant Professor of English at Samford University. He received his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis and was a Volkswagen Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Heidelberg University. His first book, Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imaginatin, was published in 2020 with The University of Chicago Press. His work has appeared in The New England Quarterly, Journal of American Studies, The African American Review, Amerikastudien, and more.