Paul Strohm is the Anna Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He was formerly J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where he continues as Research Fellow of St Anne's College. He has written five books including: Social Chaucer (Harvard, 1989, 1994); Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, 1992); Theory and the Premodern Text (Minnesota, 2000); and Politique: Languages of Statecraft Between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame, 2005).