Timothy Hampton is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley, where he chairs the French Department and holds the Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professorship.  He has written widely on the relationship between literature and political discourse in the Renaissance, in both the Romance Languages and English.  Among his many articles are essays on such figures as Montaigne, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Bob Dylan.  He is the author of three books published by Cornell University Press:  "Fictions of Embassy:  Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe," "Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century:  Inventing Renaissance France,"  and "Writing from History:  The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature."  He is the director of the "Diplomacy and Culture" group at Berkeley and founder of the "Renaissance and Early Modern Studies."  He is currently working on the history of diplomatic thought, on the history of emotion, and on popular music.