Cecelia Tichi is an award-winning teacher and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English Emerita at Vanderbilt University. Her books span US literature and culture from the seventeenth century through recent times, including a biography of Jack London and a book—Civic Passions—profiling seven activists in the tumultuous years of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era of the 1910s.  

Cecelia’s books have been reviewed in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Publishers’ Weekly, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations, and she has held the Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. She has lectured widely in the U.S. and internationally from Europe to East Asia.  

Cecelia’s research and teaching inspired What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age, followed by Gilded Age Cocktails and Jazz Age Cocktails, which set the stage for her mystery crime novels—the “Val and Roddy DeVere Gilded Age Series that boasts “Gilded” in each title—the first, A Gilded Death, is set in Newport in the summer of 1898.