Transnational Pasts

Dr. Cohen has published Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain as well as numerous articles on Renaissance literature, literary criticism, and the history of the novel.  He is one of four editors of The Norton Shakespeare (2nd ed. 2008) and is currently completing a critical study entitled European Literature (under contract with Princeton University Press), on the history of European literature in relation to the non-European world.

Dr. Bin Wong is a distinguished and creative scholar of Chinese and world history, focusing both on the social and economic forces that have affected the course of Asian history and development over the past thousand years. His publications include China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Cornell University Press, 1997, which has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), and "The Search for European Differences and Domination in the Early Modern World: A View from Asia," which was published in the American Historical Review in 2002.

Dr. Liu specializes in modern Chinese literature and culture, critical translation theory, postcolonial empire studies, as well as semiotics and media studies. Her work has focused on literary modernity in translation, the movement of words, ideas, and artifacts across cultures, sovereign thinking in the nineteenth century, and the evolution of writing, textuality, and technology. Her English publications include Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (1995), The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (2004), Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (edited, 1999), and Writing and Materiality in China (co-edited with Judith Zeitlin, 2003).

Dr. Nussbaum is the author most recently of The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press), and editor of The Global Eighteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press). Her publications include Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Narratives (Johns Hopkins University Press). Her most recent essays range from studies of blackness, slavery, and the Orient, to actresses' memoirs, theatrical property, and celebrity. Her current projects include a book on the women, performance, and material practices in the eighteenth-century British theatre; and a collection of essays on The Arabian Nights in historical context.

Dr. Burton is the author of Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579-1624. University of Delaware Press, 2005 as well as (with Ania Loomba)  Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, New York: Palgrave, 2007. His interests include Anglo-Islamic relations in the Renaissance.

Dr. Purdue is the author of Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan 1500-1850 A.D.(Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987) and China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2005). His research interests lie in modern Chinese and Japanese social and economic history, history of frontiers, and world history. He is a recipient of the 1988 Edgerton Award, the James A. Levitan Prize, and a past holder of the Ford International Career Development Chair.

Dr. Beverley's interests include Modern and Early Modern South Asia, Transnational History, Comparative Colonialism, Islamic Studies, British Empire, Urban Studies in South Asia, Indian Ocean World, Urdu and Persian Literature and Postcolonial Studies.

Professor David Wallace is Judith Rodin Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a medievalist who looks forward to the early modern period; he works on English and Italian matters with additional interests in French, German, eastern Europe, women's writing, romance, "discovery" of the Americas and the history of slavery. His publications include Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) and Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). His most recent work on medieval women's writing is Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory 1347-1645 (forthcoming, Oxford University press.) He is a also working on a comparative, literary history of Europe, 1348-1400.