Professor Miriam Thaggert is a Professor of English at the University of Buffalo. She is the author of two books: Riding Jane Crow and Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance. She also co-edited two volumes, A History of the Harlem Renaissance and African American Literature in Transition, 1920-30, both published by Cambridge University Press.

Thaggert grew up in southwest Louisiana, earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard College and her PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. A literary scholar who teaches American and African American literature, she has held academic appointments in English, African American Studies, and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Departments.

Professor Thaggert’s writings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as American Quarterly, American Literary History, African American Review, Feminist Modernist Studies, and Meridians.

Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation and the Virginia Humanities. Her interest in train travel began at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where she spent a year-long fellowship combing through the substantial Pullman Company archives held there.