Russ Castronovo is the Tom Paine Professor of English and the Dorothy Draheim Professor of American Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also the prizewinning author of titles including Necro-Citizenship (2001) and Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (2007). His latest book, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability (Princeton UP, 2023) challenges conventional approaches that leave questions of security to policy experts. Instead, Castronovo turns to literature, philosophy, and political theory to show how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it.