Hillel Schwartz is an independent scholar with a PhD from Yale University. He has taught contemporary dance improvisation, early modern European social and cultural history, religious studies, creative writing, and the history of science, medicine, and technology in 5 university departments. As co-founder of Sage Case Management (San Diego), he spent 5 years helping those confronted with urgent, complex medical issues, out of which came Long Days, Last Days: A Down-to-Earth Guide for Those at the Bedside (2013). Also a poet and essayist, he has published in more than 50 journals in 5 countries and collaborated in translations of 5 books by the eminent Korean poets Ko Un and Kim Nam-jo. His own scholarly work includes The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (1996) and Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (2011). In the fall of 2014 he was the Holtzbrinck Fellow in Cultural History at the American Academy in Berlin, researching changes in the nature, notion, and experience of “emergency” since the late eighteenth century. When this research is concluded, it will result in his 6th full-length book.