Maynard Mack is Sterling Professor of English Emeritus at Yale University.

John Bierhorst (B.A. Cornell University) is a writer and translator who has published widely on native American literature, specializing in Aztec studies. His books include Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature (1974), The Red Swan: Myths and Tales of the American Indians (1976), The Mythology of Mexico and Central America (1990), and The Way of the Earth: Native America and the Environment (1994).

Jerome W. Clinton, Ph.D. Michigan, is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His publications include two book-length translations of two sections of the Persian national epic, the Shahnameh: The Tragedy of Sohrab and Rostam and In the Dragon’s Claws: The Story of Rostam and Esfandiyar.


Francis Abiola Irele, formerly Professor of French, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, was for several years Professor of African, French, and Comparative Literature at the Ohio State University. After retiring from Ohio State in 2003, he became Visiting Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Among his many publications are The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (edited with Simon Gikandi) and two collections of essays, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology and The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. He is a contributing editor to The Norton Anthology of World Literature and General Editor of the Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature series.

Sarah Lawall, Ph.D. Yale, is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her publications include Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Structures of Literature and Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice.

Stephen Owen, Ph.D. Yale, is James Bryant Conant Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His books include The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T’ang; Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: An Omen of the World; Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature; and An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911.


Indira Viswanathan Peterson, Ph.D. Harvard, is Professor of Asian Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Her publications include Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints.