Martin Procházka is Professor of English, American and Comparative Literature at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of Romantismus a osobnost (Romanticism and Personality, 1996), a critical study of English romantic aesthetics, Coleridge and Byron, Transversals (2007), an interpretation of Romanticism as the first pluralistic project of modern culture and Ruins in the New World (2012) a theoretical study of the functions of ruins in American history and culture. He is the co-author  of Romantismus a romantismy (Romanticism and Romanticisms, 2005), a comparative study on the chief discourses in the West European, American and Czech Romanticism. His other publications include a number of edited volumes, book chapters and articles on Shakespeare, Romanticism, Structuralism and Poststructuralism, and translations of Byron’s Manfred and M.H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp into Czech. He is the founding editor of the international academic journal Litteraria Pragensia. Studies in Literature and Culture. He was the Benjamin Meeker Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol, Visiting Professor at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) and at the Universities of Glasgow and Kent, Visiting Lecturer at the University of Heidelberg, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Adelaide and Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the Visiting Professor at the University of Porto and the Honorary Professor at the University of Kent. His current research areas include Shakespeare in intercultural communication, Preromanticism and the picturesque, British Romanticism and its Czech reception, American colonial literature and literature of the early Republic, American Romanticism, Cultural History of Ruins and Ghost Towns in the U.S., Structuralism and post-structuralist theories and the problems of pragmatism, performativity and fiction in literature and philosophy.