Julian Yates received his B.A. (Hons.) in English Language and Literature from St. Anne’s College, Oxford University in 1990 and PhD in English Literature from UCLA in 1996. He is the author of some forty essays on Medieval and Renaissance literature and culture, questions of ecology, material culture, the posthuman, and literary theory; and four books: Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), which was a finalist for the Modern Language Association’s Best First Book Prize; What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do To Shakespeare? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), co-authored with Richard Burt; Object-Oriented Environs in Early Modern England (Punctum Books, 2016), co-edited with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen; and Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (Minnesota, 2017), which won the Society for Literature, Science, and Arts’ Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize. His research has been supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the American Philosophical Society.

Current projects include: a book on Shakespeare’s dramaturgy and contemporary ecologies of refuge titled Cosmopolitical Shakespeares; and, with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, a study of the legacies of Noah’s Ark in contemporary accounts of global warming, Noah’s Arkive: Towards an Ecology of Refuge.