Last September I had the honor of appearing on a panel on nineteenth-century texts with Dr. Christina Jen and other scholars from Southern University and A&M College. The panel took place at the SCMLA Conference in New Orleans, a city I had never visited. My own paper was on the influence of housing segregation on the construction of the heroine’s innocence in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. The presentation drew upon elements of my recent article published in Novel on the Underground Railroad and James’s masterpiece.

Not long after posting on Instagram, I deleted my (relatively new) account, wanting nothing to do with the platform’s anti-LBGTQ bent. The picture from the post, which I took while wandering in amazement around New Orleans, appears above.