Claire Preston is Professor of Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her books include Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early-Modern Science (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Bee (Reaktion, 2006), and Edith Wharton's Social Register (Macmillan/St Martin's, 2000). She is the recipient of Guggenheim and British Academy research awards and of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy.