About the Author
Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including Tyrant, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story that Created Us, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize); Shakespeare's Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. He has edited seven collections of criticism, including Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, for both Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England and The Swerve, the Sapegno Prize, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Wilbur Cross Medal from the Yale University Graduate School, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Arcadia―Accademia Letteraria Italiana.
Julie Crawford (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania), The Early Seventeenth Century, is the Mark Van Doren Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. She works on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture and has written on Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Margaret Cavendish, the Sidneys, Anne Clifford, Margaret Hoby, and Mary Wroth, as well as on post-Reformation religious culture, the history of reading, and the history of sexuality. She is the author of Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England and Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England. She is currently completing a book entitled Margaret Cavendish's Political Career. Her articles have appeared in Studies in English Literature, English Literary History, Renaissance Drama, PMLA, Early Modern Culture, Huntington Library Quarterly, The Oxford Companion to Popular Print Culture, The History of British Women’s Writing, 1500–1610, and in a wide range of edited collections.
Julie Orlemanski (Ph.D. Harvard), The Middle Ages, is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She teaches and write about texts from the late Middle Ages and theoretical and methodological questions in present-day literary studies. She is also co-editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. Her book Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England considers embodiment in the historical period just prior to medicine’s modernity. She is currently working on a book entitled Things Without Faces: Prosopopoeia in Medieval Writing, which is a new account of literary person-making, beginning with twelfth-century innovations in devotional imagery and speculative allegory and continuing to the reinvention of those figural techniques in the French and English poetry of the two centuries following.
Courtney Weiss Smith (Ph.D. Washington Unversity), The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, is Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University and Associate Editor at History & Theory. Her first book, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (2016), won the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarship in eighteenth-century studies. She is currently writing Sound Stuff: Words in Enlightenment Philosophy and Poetics, a history of ideas about poetic sound (including rhyme, onomatopoeia, pun, and polyptoton).
Tiffany Stern (Ph.D. Cambridge), The Sixteenth Century, is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Birmingham. Her work combines literary criticism, theatre and book history and editing from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In particular, she studies the theatrical contexts that brought about plays by Shakespeare and others. As General Editor of the New Mermaids play series and Arden Shakespeare 4, she looks at the way plays were manifested in manuscript and print, and at how to rethink editing for the digital age. She is currently at work on a book on early modern theatre and popular entertainment, Playing Fair, a book on Shakespeare Beyond Performance, looking at the theatrical documents produced in the light of a play’s performance, and an edition of Shakespeare’s Tempest.