Jayne Elisabeth Archer, PhD, is Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. She is an Associate Fellow of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick. She is General Editor of John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, 5 vols (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and coeditor of two essay collections: The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford University Press, 2007) and The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). She is currently editing Volume 3: The Verse Treatises for the Oxford University Press Works of Fulke Greville. She has published articles on Elizabethan and Jacobean masques, early modern women’s receipt books, and alchemy in early modern literature, and is currently working on a book-length study of the relationship between housewifery and natural philosophy in early modern England.
Penny Bayer has a PhD from the University of Warwick, England, for a thesis on “Women’s alchemical literature in Italy, France, the Swiss Cantons, and England, 1560–1616, and its diffusion to 1660.” She is author of various articles and essays based on this research: “Jeanne du Port, alchemist daughter of Joseph du Chesne,” Rosenholmeren: Notiitser og Meddelelser fra Renaessancestudier ved Aarhus Universitet; “Alchemy and female culture 1560–1616,” Proceedings of the Graduate Conference, Centre for British and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Warwick, 2001; “Lady Margaret Clifford’s Alchemical Receipt Book and the John Dee Circle,” Ambix, November 2005; and “From kitchen hearth to learned Paracelsianism: women and alchemy in the Renaissance,” in “Mystical Metal of Gold”: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture.
Alain Ekorong obtained both his Master’s and his PhD from the University of Oregon, where he taught French and Francophone cultures to graduate and undergraduate students for 6 years, and where he was also an adjunct assistant professor. He has taught at Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. A specialist of the French Renaissance, his research focuses on exploring this period from marginal spaces, especially mysticism and colonial metaphors.
Dorothea Heitsch, PhD, formerly Associate Professor of French at Shippensburg University and currently lecturer in French in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, is the author of Practising Reform in Montaigne’s Essais (2000) and of articles on Montaigne, Marie de Gournay, Antoine de la Sale, Léon l’Hébreu, and Hélisenne de Crenne. She has coauthored, with Jean-François Vallée, Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue (2004) and she is finishing a book manuscript on literature and medicine.
Kathleen P. Long, PhD, is Professor of French at Cornell University. She has published several books, including Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Ashgate, 2006), and several edited volumes, including Religious Differences in France (Truman State Press, 2006), as well as a number of articles on sexuality and gender in early modern France. Her current project is a study of the representation of human bodies in alchemical treatises.
Simone Pinet, PhD, is Associate Professor of Spanish and Medieval Studies at Cornell University. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature and culture; the approach in these courses tends to be interdisciplinary, addressing literary cultures, theories of space, poetics, books of chivalry and prose fiction in general, theories of fiction, cartography, and critical theory. Her books include: El baladro del sabio Merlín: Notas para la historia y caracterización del personaje en España. México: JGH, 1997. Bibliotheca Litterarum Humaniorum, Krinein, no. 2; Archipelagoes: Insularity and Fiction in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (University of Minnesota Press, 2010); The Task of the Cleric: Three Studies on the ‘Libro de Alexandre’ (in progress); and Courting the Alhambra: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to the Hall of Justice, coedited with Cynthia Robinson (Brill: Leiden, 2009). She has also published numerous articles on medieval and Golden Age Spanish literature and culture.
Meredith K. Ray, PhD, is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Delaware and the author of Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (University of Toronto Press, 2009). She has published articles on gender and epistolary writing, convent culture in early modern Venice, and the Renaissance querelle des femmes. She coedited the Lettere familiari of Arcangela Tarabotti (Rosenberg & Sellier, 2005) and has received grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Penn Humanities Forum Mellon Research Seminar, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Renaissance Society of America.
Kirk D. Read, PhD, is Associate Professor of French and Chair of the Humanities Division at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. He has published on questions of sex, gender, and sexuality in early modern France, concentrating on how literary expression is informed by medical, historical, and political discourses. Recent work has focused on midwives’ accounts of birthing as compared with lyric, popular, and satirical renderings in writers such as Catherine des Roches, Pierre Boaistuau, André Thevet, and Agrippa d’Aubigné. His current book-length project, Birthing Bodies: Inscribing Reproduction in Early Modern France, explores the currency of the birthing body across these genres and disciplines in early modern France. Kirk Read teaches a range of courses in both language and literature ranging from women writers of the 17th century, to the literature and film of francophone North Africa, to a course on Tintin and bande dessiné.
Bridgette Sheridan, PhD, is Assistant Professor of History at Framingham State College. She was the guest editor and contributor for New England Journal of History: Special Issue on Gender, Fall 2008. She has also published numerous articles and gender, sexuality, and childbirth, including: “From a Manly Knowledge to a Man’s Helpmeet: Changing Conceptions of Midwives’ Roles in Seventeenth-Century France,” in an edited collection of essays from Creating Women: Notions of Femininity from 1350 to 1700 Conference, “Elite and Vernacular Medicine: The Practices and Epistemologies of Midwives and Medical Men, 1550–1700,” (with Cynthia Klestinec) in Attending to Early Modern Women—and Men, and “Midwives and Physicians,” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Love, Courtship, and Sexuality through History.
Elliott M. Simon, PhD, is Professor of English at the University of Haifa. He is author of The Myth of Sisyphus: Renaissance Theories of Human Perfectibility (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007) and The Problem Play in British Drama, 1890–1914, as well as editor of a volume on The Jewish Self-Portrait in European and American Literature (1996). He has also authored a number of articles on a wide range of subjects, including Renaissance Neoplatonism.
Sean Teuton, PhD, is Associate Professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His publications include the book, Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel (Duke University Press, 2008), and numerous articles on Native American literature and culture (as well as pedagogical issues relative to Native American Studies), for example: “In Open Daring: Risk and Vulnerability in the Poetry of Simon J. Ortiz,” in A Spring Wind: The Work of Simon J. Ortiz, and “The Callout: Writing American Indian Politics.” Reasoning Together: Native Critics in Dialogue, “Internationalism and the American Indian Scholar: Native Studies and the Challenge of Pan-Indigenism,” Identity Politics Reconsidered, and “Placing the Ancestors: Postmodernism, ‘Realism,’ and American Indian Identity in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood,” American Indian Quarterly 25.4 (2001). He is at work on a second book on human rights and Native diplomacy entitled, Cities of Refuge: American Indian Literary Internationalism, a project that has received the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship and the Katrin H. Lamon Fellowship from the School of American Research.