Current Editorial Board

Founding Editorial Board


Kent Puckett, Co-Chair, is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley and author of Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 2008). He is at work on two projects: one on close reading and another on British war cinema.

Alan Tansman, Co-Chair, writes about modern Japanese literature and culture. He is the author of The Writings of Kôda Aya (Yale) and, forthcoming, The Culture of Japanese Fascism (Duke), and The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (California). He is writing a book comparing Japanese and Jewish responses to atrocity, about which he also teaches, and is completing an annotated translation of Tokyo as an Idea: Isoda Kôichi's Essays on Literature and Space (California). Tansman has also published on Japanese cultural criticism, popular music, film, East-West cultural relations, Area Studies, and the sublime in Japanese literature. He has also translated Japanese fiction and criticism.

David Bates teaches modern Intellectual History in the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley. He works in two main areas of research: the history of cognition and technology, and the history of legal and political thought. His latest book is States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (Columbia, 2012) and he is now at work on a new project tracing the the history of human insight and the technologies of articial thinking, from Descartes to the present.

Stephen Best is Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and author of The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (University of Chicago, 2004). Currently, he is working on a new project on rumor, promiscuous speech, and slavery's archive.

C.D. Blanton is Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests include modernist literature and thought generally, as well as the long history of post-romantic verse. He is the author of Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism (Oxford, forthcoming) and co-editor of two volumes of postwar poetry: Pocket Epics: British Poetry After Modernism (Yale Journal of Criticism) and A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Blackwell). He is currently working on a project on the end(s) of modernist aesthetics.

Carol J. Clover is a Professor of Rhetoric and Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include film history and theory, narrative history and theory, and the literature and culture of early Northern Europe. Her publications include Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992); "Dancin' in the Rain," Critical Inquiry 21 (1995); and Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide, co-edited with John Lindow (1985). She's at work on a book on the ways that Anglo-American legal process have given rise and shape to some of the most distinctively Anglo-American forms of narrative and cinematic process.

Whitney Davis teaches the history and theory of ancient and modern art in the Department of History of Art at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of books on prehistoric art, ancient Egyptian art, method and theory in art history and archaeology, contemporary sculpture, and the history of psychoanalysis. He has special interests in the interrelation of theories of mind and theories of imagistic and pictorial meaning. Currently he is working on a book on homoerotic aesthetics from the 1750s to the 1920s and a study of the logical foundations of visual culture.

Ian Duncan, Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, works on the novel, nineteenth-century British literature and culture, and Scotland in the periods of Enlightenment and Romanticism. His books include Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (Cambridge, 1992), Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, 2007), and a co-edited collection of essays, Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge, 2004).

Beate Fricke is Assistant Professor of Medieval Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published a book on idolatry and image culture in the Middle Ages and co-edited a volume on the contribution of images to the formation of communities from late antiquity to the twenty-first century (in press). Recent articles focus on subjects at the "margins of culture," such as incest and anthropophagy, by exploring how Kippfiguren and other marginal insignia defined "culture" during the High and late Middle Ages. Currently she is preparing a monograph on blood, animation, and the origins of "life" in the late Middle Ages for publication.

Catherine Gallagher is a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include nineteenth-century British literature, British novels, Victorian nonfiction prose, and British women's literature. She is the author of Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (1995), and Practicing New Historicism, with Stephen Greenblatt (2001), and the co-editor of The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, with Thomas Laqueur (1987).

David Henkin teaches U.S. History at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (Columbia University Press, 1998), and The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Carla Hesse is Peder Sather Professor of European History at the University of California at Berkeley. She writes about politics and culture since the French Revolution, and is author of Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris (1991) and The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, 2001). She is currently completing a book on political justice in the French Revolution and writing about the cultural afterlives of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Kinch Hoekstra teaches in the Department of Political Science and the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, and is an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He works on topics in the history of philosophy and concentrates on the political, moral, and legal thought of ancient Greece and early modern Europe.

Andrew F. Jones teaches modern Chinese literary and cultural studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Duke University Press, 2001), and A Narrow Cage: Evolutionary Thinking and the Development of Modern Chinese Literature (Harvard University Press, forthcoming), and has translated literary works by Yu Hua and Eileen Chang.

Steven Justice is Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (California, 1994).

Jeffrey Knapp is Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley, 1992), Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago, 2002), and Shakespeare Only (Chicago, 2009). He is currently working on a book about the theory and practice of mass entertainment.

Thomas Laqueur works on European cultural history. A founding editor of Representations, he writes about the history of the body and of sexuality (Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, 2003) and about the history of death (a new book, The Dead Among the Living, is almost finished).

Niklaus Largier is Professor of German Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He has published books and articles on late medieval religious traditions. Currently, he is working on ascetic practices, the senses, and the arousal of the imagination. Recent publications include In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (American trans. 2007), and Die Kunst des Begehrens: Askese, Dekadenz, und Sinnlichkeit (2007).

Colleen Lye is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches courses in Asian American literature, postcolonial theory, and American Studies. She is the author of America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton, 2005), which won an outstanding book award from the Association for Asian American Studies and honorable mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize from the Association for American Studies. Currently, she is working on theoretical questions of Asian American literary history.

Saba Mahmood is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, which received the 2005 Victoria Schuck award from the American Association of Political Science. Mahmood is the recipient of the Carnegie Corporation Scholar's Award (2007) and the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2009-10). Her current project focuses on the politics of religious freedom in the Middle East.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist, teaches at the UC Berkeley School of Information. His linguistics research includes work on semantics and pragmatics, information access, the structure of written language, and language policy; he has also written on the history and cultural implications of information technologies. His recent books include Talking Right (2006), about the language of contemporary American politics, and Ascent of the A-Word (2012), about the changing lexicon of civility in everyday life. He is winner of the Linguistic Society of American Language and the Pulbic Interest Award.

Todd Olson is the author of Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism and the Politics of Style (Yale University Press, 2002). His main areas of interest are class and sexuality in visual representation, history of art criticism and theory, and the politics of collecting. He is currently writing a book entitled Caravaggio's Pitiful Relics: Painting History after Iconoclasm. He has published aspects of this book as "Pitiful Relics: Caravaggio's Martrydom of St. Matthew" (Representations 77, 2002). His publications include "'Long Live the Knife': Andrea Sacchi's Portrait of Marc'Antonio Pasqualini" (Art History) and "Caravaggio's Coroner: Forensic Medicine in Giulio Mancini's Art Criticism" (Oxford Art Journal).

Samuel Otter is Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Melville's Anatomies (1999) and the co-editor of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (2008). His book entitled Philadelphia Stories: Literature, Race, and Freedom (2010). He recently has published essays on literature and politics in Frank J. Webb's novel The Garies and Their Friends, Melville's aesthetics, fiction and fact in Melville's Typee, and the quest for an American literary criticism.

Jonathan Sheehan is Associate Professor of early modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005), winner of the George Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association. His current attentions are split between a project on sacrifice and theology in the early modern period, and a coauthored book on the systems theories of the Enlightenment, and the transformation of divine providence into worldly complexity.

Mary Ann Smart is Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on opera and on European music, with particular interests in staging (historical and contemporary), the representation of gender, and the role of opera in the formation of political opinion. She is author of Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (California, 2004) and the editor of the collection Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera. Her book Risorgimento Fantasies: Opera and Political Opinion in Italy, 1815-1848 will be published in 2013.

Elisa Tamarkin is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008). She is writing a book on ideas of relevant and irrelevant knowledge since 1830.

James Vernon Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a cultural historian of modern Britain and the author of Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815-1867 (1993), editor of Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England's Long Nineteenth Century (1996), and Hunger. A Modern History (Harvard University Press, 2007).

Alexei Yurchak is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), which won the 2007 Vucinich Book Prize for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He is working on a book on urban transformation in postsocialist St. Petersburg and on a book about experimental artistic scenes in Russia at the time the Soviet Union was imploding (late 1980s–early 1990s).


Corresponding Editors

Paul Alpers is Class of 1942 Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of books on Spenser's Faerie Queene and Virgil's Eclogues and, most recently, of What Is Pastoral? His current project is "The Renaissance Lyric in England."

Svetlana Alpers, formerly Professor of the History of Art at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, The Art of Describing, Rembrandt's Enterprise, The Making of Rubens and, with Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence.

Katherine Bergeron is Dean of the College and Professor of Music at Brown University. Her research interests include French musical modernism, popular music, and film. She is the editor, with Philip Bohlman, of Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago, 1992) and the author of Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (California, 1998), which won the Deems-Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1999. She is currently completing a monograph on singing in the French Third Republic, tentatively titled Voice Lessons: A Cultural Study of Mélodie.

R. Howard Bloch is Augustus R. Street Professor of French at Yale University. He is the author of Etymologies and Genealogies, The Scandal of the Fabliaux, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love, and God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbé Migne.

T.J. Clark is the author of The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 (1973), Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973), The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984), Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), and The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006).

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. A founding editor and original co-chair of Representations, he is the author of nine books, including Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare ; Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England ; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Practicing New Historicism (with Catherine Gallagher), and Hamlet in Purgatory. He is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and the associate general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, as well as the editor of many other volumes. In 2002 he served as president of the Modern Language Association and is among the first recipients of the Mellon Distinguished Humanist Prize.

Lorna Hutson is Berry Professor of English Literature at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth Century England (Routledge, 1994) and recently editor, with Victoria Kahn, of Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (Yale, 2001). She is currently editing Ben Jonson's Discoveries (1641) for the Cambridge Complete Works of Ben Jonson, and working on a study of "suspicion" in law, rhetoric and literature in Renaissance England.

Steven Knapp is Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The Johns Hopkins University. A specialist in 18th- and 19th-century English literature and literary theory, he is the author of Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge.

Robert Post is David Boies Professor of Law at Yale University. He is the author of Constitutional Domains: Democracy, Community, Management (Harvard University Press 1995); the co-author, (with K. Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Thomas C. Grey and Reva Siegel) of Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law (Duke University Press 2001); the editor of Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation (Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities: Issues & Debates 1998) and of Law and the Order of Culture (University of California Press 1991); the co-editor (with Nancy Rosenblum) of Civil Society and Government (Princeton University Press 2002); the co-editor (with Carla Hesse) of Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia (Zone Books 1999); and the co-editor (with Michael Rogin) of Race and Representation: Affirmative Action (Zone Books 1998).

Randolph Starn is a Professor of History and Italian Studies Emeritus and former Director of Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. His scholarly interests range from Renaissance Italy and early modern cultures to philosophies of history and the institutional practices of scholarship in the humanities. His most recent book is Varieties of Cultural History: Collected Essays (2002).

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Associate Editor

Jean Day, Associate Editor, is a writer and professional editor. She is the author of six books of poetry, the most of recent of which is Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium (Adventures in Poetry, 2006). Her own work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including Nineteen Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology (Drawing Center/Roof Books, 2007) and Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Talisman House, 1998), and her translations (with Elena Balashova) of the contemporary Russian poet Nadezhda Kondakova appear in Third Wave: New Russian Poetry (University of Michigan, 1992). She is the recipient of awards from the California Arts Council, the Fund for Poetry, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Editorial Assistants

Jennifer Pranolo


Founding Editorial Board

Svetlana Alpers (Co-Chair)
Stephen Greenblatt (Co-Chair)
Paul Alpers
R. Howard Bloch
Frances Ferguson
Joel Fineman
Catherine Gallagher
Denis Hollier
Lynn Hunt
Steven Knapp
Thomas Laqueur
Walter Michaels
Paul Rabinow
Michael Rogin
Randolph Starn

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