Dr. Kelly Ross is an Associate Professor of English at Rider University where she teaches courses in American literature, African American literature, and crime fiction and film. She is the author of Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature (Oxford University Press, 2023), and her essays have appeared in PMLA, The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics, The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition, and Leviathan. She co-edits, with Emron Esplin, Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation.
Her project for the Horatio Alger Fellowship traces the continuity between antebellum antislavery activism and postbellum detection through the figure of Allan Pinkerton, the founder of Pinkerton’s Detective Agency in Chicago around 1850. Allan Pinkerton’s espionage operations during the Civil War are a crucial link between these two eras. Pinkerton’s training in detection and subterfuge was strengthened by his activities as a conductor on the Underground Railroad in antebellum Illinois. Pinkerton later became a spy for the Union army and head of the forerunner to the US Secret Service during the Civil War. Pinkerton’s background as an Underground Railroad conductor and antislavery activist reminds us that the history of detection and surveillance in the United States is deeply intertwined with the history of race and slavery.
