Kenneth Gross is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Rochester. His books include Spenserian Poetics:  Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (1985), The Dream of the Moving Statue (1992, rpt. 2006), Shakespeare’s Noise (2001), and Shylock is Shakespeare (2006), and he has published essays on a diversity of subjects, including Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, modern poetry, contemporary theater, and literary twinship. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio Study Center), the Bogliasco Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In the spring of 2008 he was the Ellen Maria Gorrisen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. The book he was researching and writing during his tenure at the Academy will be published in the fall of 2011 by the University of Chicago Press, under the title Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life.