Jessica Conrad studies nineteenth-century American print and material culture. She is interested in the ways disenfranchised groups used print and material culture to create political subjectivity. Her dissertation asks how boycott and thrift culture literature intervenes in the marketplace by outlining a moral hermeneutics of consumption. A founding member of the Colored Conventions team, Jessica enjoys mining the archive for social networks that animate communities of convention delegates. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Delaware where she helps to create, edit, and manage site content and works with undergraduate researchers.