Rebecca Bushnell writes and teaches about the genre of tragedy and early modern English culture. Her books include Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles' Theban Plays; Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought & Theater in The English Renaissance; A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice; and Green Desire, a study of early modern English gardening books. Her Companion to Tragedy was published by Blackwell in 2005 and her new book, Tragedy: A Short Introduction, was published by Blackwell in 2007. She has received an ACLS research fellowship and the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, as well as an NEH grant for Teaching with Technology. Professor Bushnell is currently serving as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences.

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...)

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...)

Melissa E. Sanchez received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. She studies and teaches sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and history, and she is particularly interested in gender studies, constitutional and religious historiography, and early modern political theory. She has been an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library, and her articles have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Sidney Journal, the Huntington Library Quarterly, English Literary History, English Literary Renaissance, and Studies in Philology. Her current book project, entitled Erotic Subjects in English Literature from Sidney to Milton, examines the political import of the perverse and ambivalent erotic relations depicted in early modern literature. She has also recently begun a second book-length project on the intersections of kinship, property, sexuality, and political loyalty in sixteenth- and  (more...)

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...)