Jean-Michel Rabaté was a student of Jacques Derrida at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and defended his dissertation under the supervision of Helene Cixous. Since 1992, he has been Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the managing editors of the Journal of Modern Literature and a co-founder and senior curator of the Slought Foundation, Philadelphia. Since 2008, he has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of more than 35 books and collections of essays on modernism (Pound, Joyce, Beckett), the arts, and philosophy.