John Watkins is a distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, where he holds affiliate appointments in History, Medieval Studies, and Italian Studies.   With Kay Reyerson and Patricia Lorcin, he co-founded the Minnesota Research Collaborative on the Mediterranean, Middle East, and North Africa.   Watkins is the author of several books and numerous articles dealing with problems of historiography; cultural, political and economic exchanges between premodern England and the Mediterranean; diplomacy; and the classical and medieval underpinnings of modernity:  The Specter of Dido:  Spenser and Virgilian Epic (Yale, 1995); Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (Cambridge, 2002); After Lavinia:  A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy (Cornell, 2017), and with historian Carole Levin, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds:  National and Transnational Identity in the Elizabethan Age (2009).  He has held fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.  He is the program chair for the Mediterranean Studies Association.