About the Authors
229GEOFFREYBENThas published essays that have been reprinted in The Best American
Essaysseries and the international collection Shakespearean Criticism. His novel Silent
Partnerswas endorsed by Scott Turow and featured in the Chicago Reader. His paintings
have appeared in galleries and museums in twenty states. On October 31st, 2014 (the
497th anniversary of the original Ninety-Five Theses), he posted fifty-five theses on the
Museum of Contemporary Art’s front door, challenging the axioms of modernism. They
have chosen to block the debate with silence. Please write to MoMA, 11 West 53rd
Street, New York, NY 10019, and say you support Bent’s challenge.
PAULA. CANTORis Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of
Virginia. He has taught at Harvard University in both the English and the Government
Departments. From 1992 to 1999, he served on the National Council on the Humanities.
He has published on a wide variety of subjects, including Shakespeare, Renaissance
drama, Romanticism, modern drama, literary theory, and popular culture. His most
recent books are Literature and the Economics of Liberty(co-edited with Stephen Cox)
and The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film
and TV.
PAULLAKEwas a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University, where he received his
MA He has taught English and Creative Writing at Santa Clara University and Arkansas
Tech. Since 2006, he has been the poetry editor of First Things. His poems and essays
have been widely published, and he has authored the poetry collections, Another Kind of
Traveland Walking Backward, as well as two novels, Among the Immortalsand Cry
Wolf: A Political Fable. In 1988, he won The Porter Prize for Literary Excellence, an
award given to one Arkansas writer each year. In 2013 his poetry collection The
Republic of Virtuewon the Richard Wilbur Award and was published by the University
of Evansville Press.
JONATHAN LECOCQis Professor of Music at the University of Canterbury,
Christchurch, New Zealand. He studied philosophy at Warwick and music at
Goldsmiths’, London and Lincoln, Oxford, and his research ranges from French music
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the philosophy and political economy of
music. He was editor of the early music journal The Consort, and has been active as a
performer on lute and related instruments. He is presently involved in University man-
agement as Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Arts.