Mita Banerjee is a professor of American studies at the University of Mainz. She studied American studies, British studies, and Slavic studies at the Universities of Mainz, Ghent, and Ohio. She is currently a research fellow of the Gutenberg Research College (GFK), as well as the director of the newly-founded Center for Comparative Native and Indigenous Studies (CCNIS). Her research interests include postcolonial literature, ethnic American literature and culture (Race-ing the Century, 2005), and the American Renaissance (Ethnic Ventriloquism: Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 2008). She has just completed a project which explores the intersection between naturalism and naturalization in American literature.