Barbara Fuchs is professor of Spanish and English at UCLA, where she also directs the Center for 17th– and 18th–Century Studies and the Clark Memorial Library. She works on literature and empire in the early modern period, in both transatlantic and Mediterranean contexts. Her books include Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and the Construction of European Identities (2001), Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (2003), Romance (2004) and Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (2009). She is one of the editors of the Norton Anthology of World Literature (2012). Her most recent book, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, is forthcoming.