Cynthia Schoolar Williams earned a Bachelor's degree in the History of Ideas from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in English from Tufts, with a concentration in the Romantic era. She is currently completing a book on hospitality and cosmopolitanism (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2014), after which she will turn to a project on the appearance of "moving pictures" in early nineteenth-century literary "sketches." Other publications range from the prize-winning essay "Mary Shelley's Bestiary: The Last Man and the Discourse of Species" to "Forms of Alienation: Transatlantic Loops and Urban Anonymity," which has recently appeared in a volume on the Atlantic public sphere. Cynthia has presented her work to the American Literature Association, the International Conference on Romanticism, and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, often exploring the interplay between verbal and visual texts. She has taught at the Museum School since January of 2009, designing writing and critical thinking courses around themes such as ecocriticism, the city as the site of modernity, the social life of objects, and the family as a performance.