Atesede Makonnen received her PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University in 2022 and her MA in Shakespeare Studies from Kings College London in 2014. Her book project, based on her dissertation “The Actual Sight of the Thing: Visualizing Blackness in Nineteenth-Century British Culture,” investigates the impact of racialized visuality on British culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, exploring how the approaching end of slavery sparked new consideration and wariness of black subjects and gave birth to persistent forms of anti-blackness centered on the concept and act of seeing. Her research works across periods and media to paint a full picture of how cultural objects contribute to and bolster ideas about race. She has received support from organizations including The American Trust for the British Library, The New York Public Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, and her work has been published in Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, and Keats-Shelley Journal, and is forthcoming from Victorian Studies, The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race, The Visual Life of Romantic Theatre, 1770-1830.