Sandra Bermann is Cotsen Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Master of Whitman College at Princeton University, USA. She was Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton for twelve years, and co-founded the university’s program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. In addition to articles and reviews in scholarly journals, she is the author of The Sonnet over Time: Studies in the Sonnets of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire (1988), and the translator of Alessandro Manzoni’s On the Historical Novel (1996). Prof Bermann also co-edited Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (2005), with Michael Wood. She recently completed a term as President of the American Comparative Literature Association.

Catherine Porter is Visiting Professor in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, USA, and Professor of French Emerita at the State University of New York at Cortland, where she chaired the Department of International Communications and Culture from 1985–91 and from 1997–2001. She has translated some three dozen books and numerous essays from the French, including recent renderings of Avital Ronell’s Fighting Theory, The Animal Side by Jean-Christophe Bailly, and Luc Boltanski’s The Foetal Condition. Prof Porter was the 2009 President of the Modern Languages Association.