Brook Thomas is Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. After a book on James Joyce's Ulysses (1982), he turned his attention to the intersections of law, literature, and cultural history in the United States. He is author of Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (1987); The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (1991); American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (1997); and Civic Myths: A Law and Literature Approach to Citizenship (2007). He has lectured on Plessy v. Ferguson to more than five thousand undergraduates over the course of several years.