Margaret Ferguson (Ph.D. Yale) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California-Davis. She is the author of Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France ( 2003) and Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (1984). Ferguson is coeditor of Feminism in Time; Women, Property , and the Letters of the Law; Literacies in Early Modern England ; and a critical edition of Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam. Professor Ferguson has served as president of the Modern Language Association and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.