Before joining the Cornell English department, Kevin Attell received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses primarily on twentieth-century American, British and Irish literature as well as literary and critical theory. He is currently working on two book projects: an examination of modern national epic fiction, titled National Characters , and a study of the work of the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose books The Open and State of Exception he has translated.