Miriam Thaggert teaches 19th, 20th, and 21st century African American and American literature and culture at SUNY- Buffalo. She is the author of Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (Amherst: Univ of Massachusetts Press, 2010), an examination of African American literature and photography and the depiction of black modernism. Her second monograph is Riding Jane Crow: African American Women and the American Railroad, a social and literary history of black female train travel in the United States. She is the co-editor of A History of the Harlem Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and African American Literature in Transition, 1920-30 (Cambridge University Press, in production). Her essays have appeared in African American Review, American Literary History, American Quarterly, and Meridians. Her research has been supported by the Newberry Library, the Ford Foundation and the Virginia Humanities.