Philip Bax presented a paper entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a ‘Root Man’: Depictions of Conjure and the Rhetoric of Romantic Racialism in the Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass” at MELUS’s annual conference in Dallas this past April. MELUS, the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the United States, aims to expand the understanding of US literature to include Latino, Native American, African American, Asian and Pacific American, and ethnically specific Euro-American literary works.