Born in Philadelphia, Mitchell B. Merback studied Fine Arts at Alfred University in New York State, then worked in sculpture and paintings conservation at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Later he went on to study Art History at the University of Chicago, receiving his Master’s degree in 1989 and his PhD in 1995. After teaching for fifteen years at DePauw University in Indiana, he is currently Associate Professor of the History of Art at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. His first book, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London and Chicago, 1999), brought critical acclaim and several awards. A second book, Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany and Austria, recently completed, is in press with the University of Chicago and is slated to appear early in 2012. He also edited Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture (Brill, 2008). Among his articles drawn from that project, one was published in the Art Bulletin and received the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for 2005’s best article in the journal. A recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, the Clark Art Institute and the American Academy in Berlin, Merback is currently pursuing a book project titled, Radical German Renaissance? Art, Dissent and Disenchantment in the Era of Reform. The first fruits of that project were published as an article in Renaissance Quarterly (vol. 63, winter issue 2010).