J.M. Bernstein is the University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He previously taught at the University of Essex and at Vanderbilt University. He works primarily in the areas of ethics, critical theory, aesthetics and the philosophy of art, and German Idealism. His books include: The Philosophy of the Novel (Minneapolis, 1984); The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Oxford, 1992); Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York, 2001); Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, 2006). He also edited and wrote the introduction for Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (New York, 2003).