Alan Warren Friedman, Thaman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, specializes in modern British, Irish, and American literature, the novel, and Shakespearean drama. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1966, writing a dissertation on Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, the subject of his first book. Subsequent authored books include Multivalence: The Moral Quality of Form in the Modern Novel; William Faulkner; Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise; Party Pieces: Oral Narrative and Social Performance in Joyce and Beckett; and Surreal Beckett: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Surrealism. He has edited or co-edited six books and a dozen special journal issues, and published on Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. He has won both the President’s Associates and Plan II’s Chad Oliver Teaching Awards, and both the English Department’s Faculty Service Award and UT’s Civitatis Award conferred annually "upon a member of the faculty in recognition of dedicated and meritorious service to the University above and beyond the regular expectations of teaching, research, and writing." He has served as Chair of the University’s Faculty Council and as Secretary of the General Faculty.