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  • Contributors

Thomas O. Beebee was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1955. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and both his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He taught German at Bowdoin College from 1984 to 1986, when he joined the faculty at Penn State. He became Associate Professor in 1991, and Professor of Comparative Literature & German in 2000. He specializes in European literature of the early modern period, criticism and theory, epistolarity, translation studies, and law and literature. His publications include the books Clarissa on the Continent, The Ideology of Genre, and Epistolary Fiction in Europe, and True Imaginary Places: Landscapes of Nation in Modern European and American Fiction. In addition he has written articles such as “Orientalism, Absence and the Poème en Prose,” “Bob Dylan: Balladeer of The Apocalypse,” and “Letters of the Law: Rhetoric and Fiction in The Artes Dictaminis.”

Tobias Boes (tboes@nd.edu) is Assistant Professor of German and a Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is currently working on his first book, tentatively entitled Children of Their Times: The Bildungsroman as a Metahistorical Genre. The present article was written while he was a graduate student in comparative literature at Yale University.

Gregory Byala has recently completed his doctoral work at Yale University with a dissertation entitled “Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Beginning.” He is currently a visiting professor of English Literature at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses on twentieth-century fiction, poetry, and drama.

Christine Clark-Evans (cxc22@psu.edu) is Associate Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies and affiliated with Women’s Studies, African and African American Studies at Penn State University. She is a specialist in sixteenth-and eighteenth-century French literature and intellectual and cultural history. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, she received her B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her [End Page 418] M.A. and Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College. Her book Diderot’s ‘La Religieuse’: A Philosophical Novel (1995) treats the philosophical implications in the eighteenth-century novel about the outlaw nun Suzanne. Other scholarly publications and courses are on early modern French women authors, philosophy, literature, science, African American philosophy, and women of color. A recipient of a number of fellowships and awards including the Newberry Library, American Council of Learned Societies, and Ford Foundation, she is presently completing a book on voice and speech in eighteenth-century France and other research is in progress.

John Dolis (jjd3@psu.edu), Professor of English and American Studies Penn State University, Scranton, has published widely in literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic journals. His most recent book is Tracking Thoreau: Double-Crossing Nature and Technology (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2005).

Jonathan P. Eburne (jpe11@psu.edu) is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English and the Pennsylvania State University, where he is Josephine Berry Weiss Early Career Professor in the Humanities. He is the author of Surrealism and the Art of Crime, forthcoming from Cornell University Press in 2008.

Djelal Kadir (kadir@psu.edu) is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University. He is the Founding President of the International American Studies Association and former editor of the international quarterly World Literature Today. He is the Co-Editor of Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History, 3 vols. (Oxford UP, 2004), of the Longman Anthology of World Literature, 6 vols. (2003), and of Other Modernisms in An Age of Globalization (Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, 2002). His authored books include: Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric As Conquering Ideology (U of California P, 1992); The Other Writing: Postcolonial Essays in Latin America’s Writing Culture (Purdue UP, 1993); Questing Fictions: Latin America’s Family Romance (U of Minnesota P, 1987). He is a member of the international board of Synapsis: The European School of Comparative Studies, and the Advisory Board of the American Comparative Literature Association.

Sarah Kay (sarahkay@princeton.edu) is Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian, Princeton University. She was previously [End Page 419] at the Universities of Cambridge and...

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