Shirley Samuels was the first House Professor-Dean of Flora Rose House. She is currently the chair of the department of Literatures in English. She recently edited a book on race and visuality in the nineteenth-century United States and is now writing a book on the American Civil War. She teaches in American Studies, Literatures in English, History of Art and Visual Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her books include The Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln; Reading the American Novel 1780-1865; Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War; and Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation.