Toni Bowers received her Ph.D. from Stanford, specializing in British literature and culture from Charles II’s restoration in 1660 to the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. She co-founded Penn’s Atlantic Studies Seminar in 2001, was Visiting Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh 1999-2000, and was for many years Faculty-in-Residence at Kings Court-English House college house, where she founded the undergraduate humanities society Perspectives in Humanities.

Dr. Bowers regularly presents her scholarship across the United States and has lectured by invitation in Canada, England, Finland, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland. In addition to her undergraduate teaching, she leads graduate seminars, directs and advises doctoral dissertations, supervises both undergraduate and graduate-level independent studies, and serves on various committees for the English Department, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the University. These include faculty hiring, promotion, and  (more...)

Margreta de Grazia received her PhD in English from Princeton with a specialization in Renaissance literature. Her first book Shakespeare Verbatim (Oxford, 1991) traces the emergence of Shakespeare as a modern author from late eighteenth-century editorial imperatives. Her recent book, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge, 2007), demonstrates how the modern tradition of psychologizing Hamlet has effaced both the play's and the protagonist's preoccupation with land and entitlement.

She has also co co-edited Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge, 1996) with Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass and the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2001) with Stanley Wells. Her interests at present include Shakespeare as an historical and cultural phenomenon, early modern notions of subjectivity and authorship, the production and ownership of early  (more...)

Michael Gamer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge, 2000). He is currently at work on two books: Recollections in Tranquility: The Collected Author and the Institutionalization of Romanticism; and A History of British Theatre: Staged Conflicts, under contract with Blackwell Publishing. He is editor of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (Penguin, 2002) and Charlotte Smith's Manon L'Escaut and the Romance of Real Life (Pickering and Chatto, 2005). He works on collaboration and is fond of collaborative work: with Jeffrey Cox he edited The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (Broadview, 2003); with Dahlia Porter Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800 (Broadview, 2008). He has also published essays in MLQ, PMLA, Novel, ELH, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Studies in  (more...)

Suvir Kaul received his B. A. (Hons.), M. A., and M. Phil. degrees from the University of Delhi, and his Ph. D. from Cornell University. His first job was at the SGTB Khalsa College in Delhi; since then, he has taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at Stanford University, and at the Jamia Milia Islamia as a Visiting Professor. He has also held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Canterbury at Kent and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He teaches courses in Eighteenth-century British Literature, Contemporary South Asian Writing in English, and in Literary and Critical Theory. He has published three books, Eighteenth-century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (University Press of Virginia, 2000; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: Ideology  (more...)

Zachary Lesser received his PhD in English Literature from Columbia University and his BA in Renaissance Studies and Religious Studies from Brown University. Before coming to Penn, he taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His teaching and research interests focus on Shakespeare and early modern drama, the history of the book, literary form and genre, and early modern political and religious debate. He is the author of Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2004), which won the Elizabeth Dietz Award, presented by Studies in English Literature to the best book of the year in early modern studies. He has published numerous essays in Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, English Literary Renaissance, and elsewhere, and he has prepared editions of Coriolanus, Measure for Measure, and The Two Noble Kinsmen for the Barnes & Noble Shakespeare and Thomas Dekker’s  (more...)

Ania Loomba received her BA (Hons.), M. A., and M. Phil. degrees from the University of Delhi, India, and her Ph. D. from the University of Sussex, UK. She researches and teaches early modern studies, postcolonial studies, histories of race and colonialism, feminist theory, and contemporary Indian literature and society, often exploring the intersections between these fields.

She has previously taught at the University of Delhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, the University of Tulsa, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was Mellon Fellow at Stanford University and has taught at the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa, as well as the School of Criticism and Theory at Karlskrona, Sweden. She currently holds the Catherine Bryson Chair in the English department. She is also faculty in  (more...)

Cary Mazer received his PhD in Theatre from Columbia University. He has published a book on Shakespeare, focusing on production history, and has written articles on Shaw, Ibsen, Granville Barker, and Edwardian Theatre. He regularly teaches courses in theatre history, Shakespeare, and modern drama, and has been involved with a number of Penn theatre productions. For many years he chaired the Theatre Arts Major. He is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and English.

Peter Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. For the last fourteen years, he has directed the seminar on the History of Material Texts, and he co-edits the Material Texts series for the University of Pennsylvania Press. While training as a mortician, he became obsessed with Dostoevsky’s novels and, under the mistaken impression that he would have more time to read at university, applied to Sussex University in England. Peter was an undergraduate, a graduate, and a professor at Sussex, where he directed the graduate program in Renaissance Studies and the faculty/graduate seminar in Critical Theory. In 1984, he co-founded the Popular Literature Group at the Centre for Social History in Oxford, organizing conferences on Romance and Detective Fiction.

In 1978, he visited the United States for the first  (more...)

Emily Steiner received her BA from Brown University and her PhD from Yale. She is the author of Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and has co-edited a collection of essays called The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2002). She has also published essays in The Yearbook of Langland Studies, New Medieval Literatures, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and Representations. She is presently working on a book manuscript provisionally titled The Politics of Literary Form. She is particularly devoted to William Langland's great fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman, but her research interests extend to Lollard literature, medieval drama and ritual performance, and Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages. Her teaching interests also include history of the English language, Old English literature, Chaucer, and  (more...)

Chi-ming Yang received her Ph.D. in English from Cornell University and her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. She has taught at Fordham University and held a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship at Barnard College, Columbia University. She specializes in 18th-century British literature and culture, with interests in travel writing, empire, colonialism, and East-West relations. Her book project, The Example of Asia: Importing Virtue in Eighteenth-century England, 1660-1760, is a study of the European fascination with Asia in the early modern period. It focuses on how China becomes an intensely debated example of virtue amidst England’s new consumer culture. Publications related to this theme of early modern Orientalism have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies and the edited collection, Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics. Her new work concerns transatlantic slavery, 17th and 18th  (more...)