Shawn Thomson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas-Pan American. He is author of The Romantic Architecture of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and several articles and book chapters on American literature and culture. He received his BA from Oberlin College, his MA from the University of Missouri, and his PhD from the University of Kansas. He is currently working on recovering the anonymously written The Spuytenduyvel Chronicle (1856). His current research interests involve the intersection of technology and aesthetics in nineteenth-century America.