Katy L. Chiles is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

"Scholars of racial representation and those working in the subfield of science and literature will find Chiles's book valuable for the way it charts the influence of eighteenth-century racial science discourse on American literature." --Shawn Salvant, Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History

"Transformable Race has strong classroom appeal, particularly as it offers a fresh, socially-conscious reading of canonical early American authors; however, teaching separate chapters would prove difficult because the sections depend on the strong trajectory that Chiles establishes. Regardless, with scientific and aesthetic cultural texts, Transformable Race effectively traces the shift from eighteenth-century understandings of exterior race to nineteenth-century conceptualizations of racial interiority that influence writers' and citizens' perceptions in the twentieth century and beyond." --Alexandra Reznik, Journal of American Culture

"...Chiles presents ample literary evidence of the concern about race and how these authors conceptualize how one becomes colored in colonial America." --Richard Mace, Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association

"Chiles's Transformable Race takes as its subject the shifting meaning of race from its eighteenth-century valence as a mutable external phenomenon to the more familiar internal 'biologized truth' that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." -- American Literature