The King James Bible and the World It Made

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

203 NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS Robert Alter is Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Having published widely in the field of comparative European literature, he is also the author of The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985), and his translation of Genesis, published as Genesis: Translation and Commentary (1997), as well as Psalms: a Translation with Commentary (2007) and, more recently, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (2010), mark him as one of the ablest of translators of the Bible in modern times. His latest book, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, was published by Princeton University Press in 2010. Beth Allison Barr received her Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently is an assistant professor of history at Baylor University. Focusing her research on women, religion, and sermon literature in late medieval and early modern England, she is the author of The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England (2008) and an editor of The Acts of the Apostles: Four Centuries of Baptist Interpretation (2009). She also has published articles on women and men in the late medieval confessional and gendered language in late medieval pastoral texts. David W. Bebbington is professor of history at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and has several times served as Visiting Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. His publications 204 Notes on the Contributors include Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (1989); The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody (2005); and, most recently with Baylor University Press, Baptists through the Centuries: A History of a Global People (2010). He is preparing a study of global religious revivals in the Victorian era for Oxford University Press. David Lyle Jeffrey is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities at Baylor University. He is also Guest Professor at Peking University (Beijing). His books include A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992); Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition (1984); People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (1996); Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture (2003); and a co-authored book, The Bible and the University (2007). Philip Jenkins is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of the Humanities at Penn State University, and also holds the rank of Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. Jenkins is a well-known commentator on religion past and present: the Economist has called him “one of America’s best scholars of religion.” His books include The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity (2002) and The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died (2008). His most recent book is Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years (2010). Laura L. Knoppers is professor of English at Penn State University, where she also served as director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities from 2001 to 2005. A specialist in seventeenth-century British literature , religion, and politics, she is the author of Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (1994); Constructing Cromwell : Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (2000); and Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011). Her scholarly edition of John Milton’s Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (2008) won the John Shawcross Award from the Milton Society of America. Her edited books include Puritanism and Its Discontents (2003) and The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (2009). Knoppers is past president of the Milton Society of America and current editor of the annual Milton Studies. Notes on the Contributors 205 Alister E. McGrath is professor of theology, ministry, and education at King’s College, London, and director of the Center for Theology, Religion and Culture. For many years he was professor of historical theology at Oxford University. He has a long-standing interest in translation theories and hermeneutics of the Renaissance and Reformation, an issue explored in depth in his Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (2003). His recent books include In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible (2001); Christianity...