Jenny Davidson is Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. She has published four books of literary criticism, four novels, several other editions, and numerous articles and essays. She is currently at work on two book projects: a handbook on career pathways for humanities doctoral students and an intellectually wide-ranging and highly personal account of what it means to read Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (originally published between 1776 and 1789) from the vantage point of the twenty-first century.