Emory Elliott is University Professor at the University of California, Riverside. Louis Freitas Caton is Professor of English at Auburn University. Jeffrey Rhyne is a graduate fellow in English at the University of California, Riverside.

This collection is an important project, the topics addressed by the contributors timely and crucial. Can humanities professors maintain aesthetic values without slipping into elitism? Can they execute political critique without turning ham-fisted and illiberal? Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age is an important step in establishing a middle way, drawing the humanities out of the old Culture Wars contraries and into a more productive, less fractious mode of teaching and research.