Barbara Fuchs is Professor of Spanish and English at UCLA, where she also directs the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William A. Clark Memorial Library. She is the author of Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and the Construction of European Identities (2001), Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (2003), Romance (2004), and Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (2009). She is also a co-editor, with Aaron Ilika, of two captivity plays by Miguel de Cervantes: The Bagnios of Algiers and The Great Sultana (2009).