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 annually by Studies in English Literature to the best book of the year in early modern studies. With Alan B. Farmer, he is co-creator of DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, an online resource for studying the printing, publishing, and marketing of Renaissance drama. He is currently trying desperately to finish a monograph on the discovery of the first quarto of Hamlet in 1823 and its textual aftermath, entitled Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text, and is also working on a revisionist study of print popularity, co-written with Alan Farmer, entitled Print, Plays, and Popularity in Shakespeare's England.