Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Rice University. His scholarship focuses on animal studies, posthumanism, systems theory and pragmatism, biopolitics and biophilosophy. Profesor Wolfe’s books and edited collections include Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory; the edited collection Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal; and, most recently, What Is Posthumanism? Founding editor of the series Posthumanities, Wolfe is currently working on two book-length projects: Before the Law: Animals in a Biopolitical Frame, on law, sovereignty, biopolitics, and species difference, and Wallace Stevens’ Birds, which uses this key topos in Stevens’ poetry to reread his body of work at the intersection of Romanticism, species difference, and posthumanism via theories of paradox, meaning, and observation drawn from second-order systems theory.