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. James Noggle (Ph.D. UC Berkeley), The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, is Professor of English at Wellesley College. He is the author of The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists and The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing, and is completing a book called Unfelt Affect: Insensible Movements in Eighteenth-Century Literature. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society. 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).