Steven Biel is executive director of the Mahindra Humanities Center and senior lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. He is the author of American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting; Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster; and Independent Intellectuals in the United States, 1910–1945 and the editor of American Disasters and Titanica: The Disaster of the Century in Poetry, Song, and Prose.
Jonathan Bolton is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University, where he teaches Czech and Central European history and culture. His book Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture Under Communism offers a new approach to the dissident movements in East Central Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. He has also edited and translated In the Puppet Gardens: Selected Poems, 1963–2005, by the Czech poet Ivan Wernisch.
Kevin Brazil is the author of Art, History, and Postwar Fiction, and his essays and criticism have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the White Review, Art Review, and art-agenda. He teaches English at the University of Southampton.
Adrienne Brown is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the coeditor with Valerie Smith of Race and Real Estate and author of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race.
Stephanie Burt is professor of English at Harvard. Her books of poetry and literary criticism include, most recently, After Callimachus and Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems. She lives in Belmont, Mass. with one spouse, two kids, two cats, and an uncanny quantity of X-Men comics.
Margaret Cohen teaches in the Department of English at Stanford University, where she holds the Andrew. B Hammond Chair. Her books include the award-winning The Novel and the Sea (2009) and The Sentimental Education of the Novel (1998), as well as Profane Illumination (1993). She is currently editing A Cultural History of the Sea (6 volumes, forthcoming) and completing a book on the history of underwater film.
Caleb Crain is the author of the novels Necessary Errors and Overthrow and of the critical work American Sympathy.
Seeta Chaganti is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Her book Strange Footing (2018) received the MLA Scaglione Prize in Comparative Literary Studies. Her scholarship explores medieval poetry’s relationship to culture, from dance to devotional artifacts. She also writes for general audiences on the opportunities medieval studies can provide to resist white supremacy and promote racial justice.
Pardis Dabashi is assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she specializes in twentieth-century American literature and film studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Arizona Quarterly, Public Books, Politics/Letters, and elsewhere. She is coeditor of The New Faulkner Studies (forthcoming 2021) and is completing her book manuscript Moving Images: Film and the Affective World of the Modernist Novel.
Lorraine Daston is director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and regular visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She has published widely on topics in the history of early modern and modern science, including probability and statistics, wonders, objectivity, observation, and scientific archives. She is the recipient of both the Pfizer Prize and the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society and of the Dan David Prize. Her most recent book is Against Nature (2019).
Theo Davis is professor of English at Northeastern University. She is the author of Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman (2016) and Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (2007). Her current project, Somatic Awareness: An Essay on Embodiment has been supported by a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.
Maud Ellmann is the Randy L. And Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English at the University of Chicago. She has written widely on modernism, Irish studies, and literary theory, with a focus on psychoanalysis. Her most recent book is The Nets of Modernism: James, Woolf, Joyce, and Freud (2010).
Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford.
Elizabeth Ferry is professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, with interests in value, materiality, mining, and finance and with fieldwork emphases in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States. She is the author of Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value, and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico (2005); Minerals, Collecting, and Value Across the U.S.-Mexico Border (2013); and with Stephen Ferry, La Batea, a book of photographs and writings about small-scale gold mining in Colombia (2017).
Penny Fielding is Grierson Professor of English at the University of Edinburgh. Her most recent book is The 1880s (2019).
Ben Fountain’s work has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and a Whiting Writers Award and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, among other honors. He lives in Dallas.
Elizabeth Graver’s fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories; Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; The Pushcart Prize Anthology; and Best American Essays. She teaches at Boston College.
Isabel Hofmeyr is professor of African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. She lives in Johannesburg where she heads up the Mellon-funded project “Oceanic Humanities for the Global South.” A new book entitled Hydrocolonialism: Coast, Custom House, and Dockside Reading is forthcoming.
Emily Hyde is an assistant professor of English at Rowan University. Her articles and reviews on comparative modernisms, postcolonial literature, and contemporary literature and photography appear in PMLA, Literature Compass, Post45: Peer Reviewed, Comparative Literature Studies, Public Books, and Post45: Contemporaries. She is at work on A Way of Seeing: Postcolonial Modernism and the Visual Book, a project examining the global forms of mid-twentieth-century literature through the vexed status of the visual.
Lauren Kaminsky is the director of studies and an associate senior lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard University. A historian of gender, sexuality, and the Soviet Union, she is also a faculty associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
Ivan Kreilkamp is professor of English in the Department of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he is also coeditor of Victorian Studies. His most recent books are “A Visit From the Goon Squad” Reread (Columbia, 2020) and Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel (2018).
Yoon Sun Lee teaches at Wellesley College. She is the author of Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle and Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life, as well as articles published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Representations, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory, The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel, MLQ, ELH, and other journals. Her current book project examines plot and objectivity in the realist novel.
Ursula K. Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley and died in 2018 in Portland, Oregon. As of 2017, she had published twenty-three novels, twelve collections of stories, five books of essays, thirteen books for children, nine volumes of poetry, and four of translation. Among her awards are the Hugo, Nebula, National Book, and PEN-Malamud, and she has been honored as a Library of Congress Living Legend and with the National Book Foundation Medal.
Kathryn Lofton is professor of religious studies, American studies, history, and divinity at Yale University. A historian of religions, she is the author of two books, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011) and Consuming Religion (2017), and one coedited collection (with Laurie Maffly-Kipp), Women’s Work: An Anthology of African-American Women’s Historical Writings (2010).
Sharon Marcus is a founding editor of Public Books and Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Council of Learned Societies, she is the author of Apartment Stories (1999), Between Women (2007), and The Drama of Celebrity (2019).
Kate Marshall is associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also faculty in the history and philosophy of science. She is the author of Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013), and her second book, A Poetics of the Outside, is under contract. She edits the Post45 book series for Stanford University Press.
Sean McCann is professor of English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government (2008) and Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (2000).
Stephen McCauley is the author of nine novels, including The Object of My Affection and My Ex-Life. He currently serves as codirector of creative writing at Brandeis University.
Andrew H. Miller is the author, most recently, of On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives, as well as essays in Brick, Michigan Quarterly Review, Representations, PMLA, and elsewhere. He is professor of English at Johns Hopkins University.
Toril Moi teaches at Duke University. Among her books are Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994); Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (2006); and Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (2017). She also works extensively on Norwegian and contemporary literature and writes regularly for the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet and less regularly for The Point magazine.
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee researches on Victorian and contemporary imperialism and colonialism, environmental/ecological criticism, and world literary studies. He is the author of five monographs, three edited collections, and a wide range of scholarly essays, including Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India (2020); Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (with WReC, 2015); Natural Disasters and Victorian Imperial Culture (2013); Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture, and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (2010); and Crime and Empire (2003). He is currently working with his WReC colleagues on a volume called Keywords in World-Literature and editing a special issue of Revue Etudes Anglaises on “Energy Humanities.”
John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University; his books include Time and the Tapestry: A William Morris Adventure and Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience Since Dickens. He edits the B-Sides feature in Public Books and hosts the podcast Recall This Book.
Leah Price’s books include What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (2019); How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012); and The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (2000). She writes for the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and New York Review of Books. She teaches at Rutgers.
Carlo Rotella’s most recent book is The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood. A professor of English at Boston College, he contributes regularly to the New York Times Magazine, and his work has also appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Best American Essays.
Paul Saint-Amour is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and chairs the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination and Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Saint-Amour edited Modernism and Copyright and coedits, with Jessica Berman, the Modernist Latitudes series at Columbia University Press.
Salvatore Scibona’s most recent novel, The Volunteer, has been published or is forthcoming in seven languages. His first novel, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award. He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a Whiting Award and has been named one of the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” fiction writers. He directs the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at UC Berkeley. She’s the author of Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014) and a novel, The Old Drift (Hogarth, 2019), which won the 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book prize and the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. She has received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.
Vanessa Smith is professor of English Literature at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on the literature of Oceanic/European contact and on object-relations psychoanalysis and literary form. She has written at greater length on Milner’s A Life of One’s Own in “Transferred Debts: Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own and the limits of analysis,” Feminist Modernist Studies 1, no. (1–2): 96–111.
Ramie Targoff is professor of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of Common Prayer; John Donne, Body and Soul; Posthumous Love; and Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna. Her translation of Colonna’s 1538 Rime is forthcoming in 2021. She is currently working on a joint biography of four women writers from the English Renaissance, Shakespeare’s Sisters.
Rebecca Zorach teaches and writes on early modern European art, the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary activist art. Her books include Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (2005); The Passionate Triangle (2011); the exhibition catalogue The Time Is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, 1960–1980 (2018); and Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965–1975 (2019).