Dr. Alisha Knight is a summa cum laude graduate of Spelman College and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Drew University where she earned her Ph.D. in English.  As an Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Washington College, she teaches courses on African American literature, late 19th-century American literature, literary and print culture, and literature and composition.  Outside of the classroom, she directs the Black Studies program and coordinates the Black Studies/Multicultural Affairs Book Club.  Dr. Knight has published articles about Pauline Hopkins, Sutton Griggs and Booker T. Washington.  Her most recent work, “’To have the benefit of some special machinery’:  African American Book Publishing and Bookselling, 1900-1920” will be included in U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920, a collection of essays forthcoming from Oxford University Press in April 2010.  Dr. Knight also has a book manuscript under review at the University of Tennessee Press, tentatively titled, “Debunking the American Dream:  Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s (Re)Visionary Gospel of Success.”  She is currently researching the turn-of-the-century African American book publishing trade.