Current Editorial Board
Michael Lucey, Co-Chair, is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley. His book What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022. He is at work on several new projects, including one called Thinking about Sexuality with Novels. Previous books include Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert; Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust; and The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality.
Nicholas Mathew, Co-Chair, has published work on the relationships between music and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the place of music in political institutions, the role of music in public life, and the ways in which music constructs collective identity – as well as issues of political appropriation, subversion, musical trashiness, and political kitsch. In his book Political Beethoven (2013) he reexamines the politically charged rhetoric of Beethoven’s music and its later reception, teasing out relationships between his canonical music and the political schlock of the Napoleonic era, including his own alleged potboilers. The essays in the volume The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini (edited with Benjamin Walton in 2013) revisit the history of the fraught opposition between the two eponymous composers, and the artistic and philosophical traditions they have come to represent.
Weihong Bao is Associate Professor in Film and Media and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Fiery Cinema, The Emergence of An Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (Minnesota, 2015), which received honorable mention for the Best Book Prize from the Modernist Studies Association. She is currently working on a new book on background design and the discovery of environment in modern China.
Stephen Best is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His publications include The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (University of Chicago, 2004), and None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke University Press, 2018), which received honorable mention for the Best Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP).
C. D. Blanton is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, 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.
Whitney Davis teaches the history and theory of ancient and modern art in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, 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, Florence Green Bixby Professor of English at the University of California, 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). He is currently writing a book on the novel and the science of man, from Buffon to Charles Darwin, Goethe to George Eliot.
Samera Esmeir is Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently writing a second book, The Struggle that Remains: Between the World and the International, which tracks the modern entry of the word international into the English language and theorizes its emergence as a contending signifier of the world, as well as its reconfiguration of horizons of struggle. Her first book, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Spring 2012, Stanford University Press) is a historical and theoretical study of how colonial juridical powers have reconfigured the concept of the human during the late-modern colonial era by bonding the human to the law.
David Henkin teaches US History at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (Columbia University Press, 1998), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and (with Rebecca McLennan) Becoming America (McGraw-Hill, 2014).
Carla Hesse is Peder Sather Professor of European History at the University of California, 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.
Andrew F. Jones, Professor and Louis B. Agassiz Chair in Chinese, teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include music, cinema, and media technology, modern and contemporary fiction, children’s literature, and the cultural history of the global 1960s. He is the author of Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Cornell East Asia Series, 1992) and Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Duke University Press, 2001). His latest book is Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Harvard University Press, 2011).
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 (The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, 2015.)
Niklaus Largier is Professor of German Literature at the University of California, 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).
Anneka Lenssen is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press, 2020) and co-editor of a volume of art writing in translation, Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (MoMA, 2018). She is currently at work on a project exploring theoretical and practical matters of plasticity in postcolonial art school settings.
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.
David Marno, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, has published on religious and secular concepts of attention, on apocalypse as a literary and political figure, and on philosophy of history and comparative literature. His first book Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (Chicago, 2016) reads John Donne’s Holy Sonnets as a site where the bonds between premodern devotional, literary, and philosophical investments in attentiveness become visible. His current project focuses on prayer in the aftermath of the Reformation.
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).
Joanna Picciotto is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (2010) explores practical efforts to restore paradise and their afterlife in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. She is currently at work on a book about natural theology.
Kent Puckett is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945 (Fordham, 2017), Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, 2016), and Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 2008).
Poulomi Saha is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley. Her first book, An Empire of Touch (Columbia UP, 2019), was awarded the Harry Levin Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association for outstanding first book. She is currently at work on a book on the allures and scandals of so-called Hindu cults in America.
Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. The author of The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham University Press, 2015), she is currently at work on a study of testimony, cultural form, and the refugee “crisis.”
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, Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Italy, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
Elisa Tamarkin is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (Chicago, 2022) and Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008). She is working on a book on Herman Melville.
Mario Telò is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest book is Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (OSU Press 2020). He is now finishing a book entitled The Resistance of Form: Crisis/Dissent/Aristophanes (for the Tangent series published by Punctum Books). Two edited volumes, Queer Euripides (under contract with Bloomsbury) and The Before and the After: Archê and Avenir at a Time of Crisis, are forthcoming.
Damon R. Young is Associate Professor of French and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley, and Visiting Associate Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College. He is the author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies (Theory Q, Duke University Press, 2018), shortlisted for the 2019 ASAP Book Prize, and co-editor of “The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism” (special issue, Social Text 127) and “Queer Bonds” (special issue, GLQ 17.2-3). He is currently working on two books: one on figures of refusal, sameness, transformation, and revolution in queer cinema and another on technological mediations of the self from the diary to Instagram.
Corresponding Editors
Svetlana Alpers, Professor Emerita of the History of Art at the University of California, 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.
R. Howard Bloch is Sterling 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, God’s Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne, and many other books.
T. J. Clark, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, 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), and Picasso and Truth (2013).
Carol J. Clover is a Professor Emerita 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.
Catherine Gallagher is a Professor Emerita 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).
Stephen Greenblatt is John 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 Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford. Her books include Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford, 1989); The Usurer’s Daughter (Routledge, 1994); The Invention of Suspicion (Oxford, 2007) and Circumstantial Shakespeare (Oxford, 2015). She edited the Oxford Handbook of Law and Literature, 1500-1700 (2017) and is now working on a book entitled England’s Insular Imagining.
Steven Justice is Professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (1994) and Adam Usk’s Secret (2015). He is at work, more or less for the duration, on volume 3 of the Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman.
Jeffrey Knapp is the Eggers Professor of English at UC Berkeley. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Fellowship, he has written four books: An Empire Nowhere: England and America from Utopia to The Tempest (1992); Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (2002), which won the Best Book in Literature and Language award from the Association of American Publishers, the Book of the Year award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize for the Best Book in Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference; Shakespeare Only (2009), which Choice named an Outstanding Academic Title of the year; and Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Steven Knapp is a former president of the George Washington University, Washington, DC. 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 Sterling Professor of Law at Yale University. He has written and edited numerous books, including Citizens Divided: A Constitutional Theory of Campaign Finance Reform (2014), which was originally delivered as the Tanner Lectures at Harvard in 2013. Other books include, Democracy, Expertise, Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State (2012); For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (with Matthew M. Finkin, 2009); and Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law (with K. Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Thomas C. Grey, and Reva Siegel, 2001).
Randolph Starn is a Professor Emeritus of History and Italian Studies 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. He is the author of Varieties of Cultural History: Collected Essays (2002) and other books. His novel Giotto’s Venetian Moor (co-written with Orin Starn) was published in 2018.
Associate Editor
Diana Wise
Editorial Assistant
Virginia Georgallas
Founding Editorial Board
The editorial board around 1984. Left to right, Seated: Stephen Greenblatt, Svetlana Alpers, co-chairs. standing: Paul Alpers, Frances Ferguson, Randolph Starn, Paul Rabinow, Michael Rogin, Joel Fineman, Steven Knapp, Thomas Laqueur, Catherine Gallagher, Walter Benn Michaels. Not pictured: Denis Hollier, Lynn Hunt, R. Howard Bloch.