Paul Hernadi is a Research Professor in the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a Ph.D. in the History of Theater from the University of Vienna in 1963, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 1967. His central interests include literary theory, history of criticism, and European drama. He is the author of Cultural Transactions: Nature, Self, Society (1995), Interpreting Events: Tragicomedies of History on the Modern Stage (1995), and Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classifications (1972).