Robert JC Young, FBA, is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. His writing ranges across the fields of cultural and political history, literature, philosophy, photography, psychoanalysis and translation studies, with a particular focus on colonial history and postcolonial theory. His publications include White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Wiley, 2001), Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003), and The Idea of English Ethnicity (Wiley, 2008). He is the editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.