Robert Appelbaum, Professor, Department of English, Uppsala University

Robert Appelbaum received his BA (Tutorial Studies) from the University of Chicago an his PhD (English) from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the University of Cincinnati, the University of San Diego, and the Lancaster University before taking up his current position as Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has been a fellow of the Mellon Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. In 2007 he received the Roland H. Bainton Prize for his study of food, literature and culture in the Renaissance, Aguecheek's Beef.

"This ambitious work has a great deal to offer scholars of early modern history as well as the study of terrorism ... His thesis that there is a nascent 'line of descent' in terrorist violence, from the ancient world, to the early modern, to the modern day, is compelling. It suggests new directions for historians of violence when considering early instances of terror, and convincingly argues for a broader approach to critical terrorism studies." - Jane Fitzgerald, Parergon

"Terrorism before the Letter carefully recovers the literary history of a so-called mythography of terrorism that Robert Applebaum locates in the bloody religious conflicts of early modern Europe. While boldly considering early modern political violence as terrorism, Applebaum argues that literature must be discussed by scholars of terrorism more broadly ... Terrorism before the Letter offers a timely contribution to terrorist studies." - Alexander D. Campbell, Times Literary Supplement

"...the book provides a model of applying present-day ways of thinking about terrorism to the past, while respecting that past on its own terms. The result leads to a number of insights, many of them brilliant, that would bene?t all who are interested in questions of violence and its many representations." - Sarah Covinton, The Graduate Center and Queens College, CUNY, Renaissance Quarterly

"...this is a book to make historians think. His stated goals are to push critical terrorism studies towards a richer engagement with literary analysis, and to provide contemporary debates with a sense of how vested Western culture has been in the imaginary of terrorism (p. 27). But his book deserves to stimulate historiographical debate, not only about violence, terrorism and writing, but also about the possibility of transnational comparative approaches to the darker passages of the European past." - Alastair Bellany, English Historical Review