Saree Makdisi is
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, UCLA he received his PhD from
the Program in Literature at Duke University
in 1993. He is the author of Romantic
Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity
(Cambridge University Press, 1998) and William
Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003). His
primary area of research is the culture of modernity, especially as it was
consolidated in Britain
during the Romantic period, and as it developed in relation to the changing
dynamics of British imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.