Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, is a prize-winning author, educator, public speaker, and institution-builder in the arts and humanities. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Professor of Medieval Studies in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her books include Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (2004) and Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (2009). Among her edited volumes are Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West (2008), co-edited with Amilcare Iannucci, and the Oxford Handbook to Chaucer (2020).
Wiebke Denecke is S. C. Fang Professor of East Asian Literatures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her publications include The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi (2010), Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons (2014), The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (2017) and a three-volume literary history of Japan from an East Asian perspective (Nihon “bun”gakushi) (2015–19). Denecke is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of The Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature, a bilingual translation series, which features smartly scholarly and eminently readable translations of East Asian literatures in Chinese.
Barbara Fuchs is Professor of Spanish and English at UCLA, where she also directs the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William A. Clark Memorial Library. She is the author of Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and the Construction of European Identities (2001), Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (2003), Romance (2004), and Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (2009). She is also a co-editor, with Aaron Ilika, of two captivity plays by Miguel de Cervantes: The Bagnios of Algiers and The Great Sultana (2009).
Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written three books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003), Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007), and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). She is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Pericles Lewis is Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and Dean of Yale College at Yale University. The author or editor of six books on modern literature, he has most recently served as editor for literature since 1900 of the Norton Anthology of World Literature. He also served as founding President of Yale-NUS College (now NUS College) a joint venture between Yale and the National University of Singapore.
Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and early modern studies, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia.
