Nicholas Birns has taught at several institutions in the New York area and lectured abroad in Sweden, Australia, and China. He teaches classic and contemporary fiction and the major works of Western and world literature. He recently coedited The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel and is the author of The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space and The Literary Role of History in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Among his other books are Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory from the 1950s to the Early Twenty-First Century, Understanding Anthony Powell, and Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead. He has contributed articles to The New York Times Book Review as well as Modernism/Modernity, Modern Language Quarterly, Partial Answers, and Studies in Romanticism