Erik Mortenson spent ten years as an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Koç University in Istanbul and is now a senior lecturer at Wayne State University’s Honors College in Detroit. He is the author of Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016) and Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence, which was selected as a Choice outstanding academic title in 2011.