David Faflik is Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. A specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, he is the author of Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840–1860 (Northwestern University Press, 2012), Melville and the Question of Meaning (Routledge, 2018), and Transcendental Heresies: Harvard and the Modern American Practice of Unbelief (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020).