Erica Burleigh is an associate professor in the English Department. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins and taught at Gettysburg College before arriving at John Jay. She has published articles on equity and genre in the novels of Charles Brockden Brown; on colonial conceptions of sovereignty in seventeenth-century religious and legal discussions of piracy; and on incest, race, and character in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's novel Hope Leslie. Her book, Intimacy and Family in Early American Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), investigates the multiple ways in which British and American writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries imagined forms of relation--discursive, affective, familial, legal and spatial--that might unite disparate people. She is at work on a second project about subjectivity in narratives of kidnapping, slavery, and piracy. Her professional interests include colonial and antebellum American literature, the transatlantic eighteenth century, American studies, maritime studies, law and literature, women's studies, and Barbary captivity narratives. (And pirates.)