Martha Jane Nadell, the author of the “Writing Brooklyn” chapter of the Cambridge Companion, is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. Martha received both her bachelor’s degree in Afro-American Studies and her doctorate in American Civilization from Harvard.

Martha is the author of Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture (Harvard UP, 2004), which explores the relationship between the literary and the visual in African American literary culture. At the heart of the book’s analysis are works from the 1920s through the 1940s that used visual elements in tandem with literary texts, such as the magazines and anthologies published by Alain Locke and Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston