Biographical note

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. Rachel Ablow (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins), The Victorian Age, is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. She specializes in nineteenth-century literature and culture with research and teaching interests in the history and theory of the novel, the history of medicine, and the histories of epistemology, the sensations, and the emotions. She is the author ofThe Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot and Victorian Pain, and the editor of a special issue of Victorian Studies on “Victorian Feelings” (2008), a volume of essays entitled The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature, and a special issue of Representations on “The Social Life of Pain.” She is currently editor of the journal Victorian Literature and Culture. Catherine Robson (Ph.D. UC Berkeley), The Victorian Age, is Professor of English at New York University and Academic Director of NYU London; she is also a faculty member of the Dickens Project. She is the author of Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman and Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, and has received fellowships from the NEH, the Guggenheim Foundation, the University of California, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and ACLS.