William D. Melaney is Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at The American University in Cairo, Egypt. His current teaching fields include Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century European Literature, the history of literary criticism, hermeneutics, and recent work in criticism. William has published three books on modernism as a literary and philosophical concept: After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics (2001); Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse (2012); and Alterity and Criticism: Tracing Time in Modern Literature (2017), as well as the book Figural Space: Semiotics and the Aesthetic Imaginary (2021), which explores a new approach to literature in adopting Julia Kristeva’s semiotics as the starting point for reinterpreting Freud and Hegel.