Lara Langer Cohen teaches courses at Swarthmore College on early American literature, especially nineteenth-century African American literature, as well as literary theory, Marxism, and old media. She is the author of Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke University Press, 2023) and The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); she is also co-editor, with Jordan Alexander Stein, of Early African American Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Recent publications include essays on the literature of Mammoth Cave, music in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, mid-nineteenth-century city mysteries, and summer jams. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Council of Learned Societies.