Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. was an American literary critic and scholar who advanced theories of literary deconstruction. He was part of the Yale School along with scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, who advocated deconstruction as an analytical means by which the relationship between literary text and the associated meaning could be analyzed. Through his career, Miller was associated with the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of California, Irvine, and wrote over 50 books studying a wide range of American and British literature using principles of deconstruction.
Stanley Louis Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.
Mary Rosamond Haas was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indigenous languages, Thai, and historical linguistics. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Carol Tecla Christ is an American former academic administrator. She served as the 11th Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, from 2017 to 2024.
Gregory Paul Currie FAHA is a British philosopher and academic, known for his work on philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Currie is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and Executive Editor of Mind & Language.
Janet Loxley Lewis was an American novelist, poet, and librettist.
Sandra Mortola Gilbert was an American literary critic and poet who published in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. She was best known for her collaborative critical work with Susan Gubar, with whom she co-authored, among other works, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Madwoman in the Attic is widely recognized as a text central to second-wave feminism. She was Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis.
Theological aesthetics is the interdisciplinary study of theology and aesthetics, and has been defined as being "concerned with questions about God and issues in theology in the light of and perceived through sense knowledge, through beauty, and the arts". This field of study is broad and includes not only a theology of beauty, but also the dialogue between theology and the arts, such as dance, drama, film, literature, music, poetry, and the visual arts.
Hannah B. Higgins is an American writer and academic living in Chicago, Illinois. Higgins's research examines various post-conceptual art historical subjects in terms of two philosophically and practically entwined terms: information and sensation. She is a Professor in the Department of Art History and a founding Director of IDEAS, an interdisciplinary arts major, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Thomas Cleveland Holt is an American historian, who is the James Westfall Thompson Professor of American and African American History at the University of Chicago. He has produced a number of works on the people and descendants of the African Diaspora. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1994.
Martin Evan Jay is an American intellectual historian whose research interests connected history with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, social theory, cultural criticism, and historiography.
Representations is an interdisciplinary journal in the humanities published quarterly by the University of California Press. The journal was established in 1983 and is the founding publication of the New Historicism movement of the 1980s. It covers topics including literary, historical, and cultural studies. The founding editorial board was chaired by Stephen Greenblatt and Svetlana Alpers. Representations frequently publishes thematic special issues, for example, the 2007 issue on the legacies of American Orientalism, the 2006 issue on cross-cultural mimesis, and the 2005 issue on political and intellectual redress.
Svetlana Leontief Alpers is an American art historian, also a professor, writer and critic. Her specialty is Dutch Golden Age painting, a field she revolutionized with her 1984 book The Art of Describing. She has also written on Tiepolo, Rubens, Bruegel, and Velázquez, among others.
Francesca Rochberg is an American Assyriologist, historian of science, and Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies at University of California, Berkeley. She is best known for her work on the history of Babylonian astronomy.
Charles Altieri is the Rachel Stageberg Anderson Professor and Chair in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Mary Montagu, Duchess of Montagu, formerly Lady Mary Churchill, was a British court official and noble, the wife of John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu. She was the youngest surviving daughter of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, and his wife, Sarah Jenyns.
New Historicism, a form of literary theory which aims to understand intellectual history through literature and literature through its cultural context, follows the 1950s field of history of ideas and refers to itself as a form of cultural poetics. It first developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s. Greenblatt coined the term "new historicism" when, as he wrote, he "collected a bunch of essays and then, out of a kind of desperation to get the introduction done, he wrote that the essays represented something called a 'new historicism'".
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Scholars regard the publishing of William Wordsworth's and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 as probably the beginning of the movement in England, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 as its end. Romanticism arrived in other parts of the English-speaking world later; in the United States, about 1820.
Romance, is a "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents". This genre contrasted with the main tradition of the novel, which realistically depict life. These works frequently, but not exclusively, take the form of the historical novel. Walter Scott describes romance as a "kindred term", and many European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo".
