Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Head of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003) and special issues of the journals Criticism, Interventions, Occasion, and Yale French Studies.