Mark Payne is Professor in the Department of Classics and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the literary imagination and its recursive effects on our everyday life worlds. His first book, Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2007) brought recent theories of fiction to bear on pastoral as the first fully fictional world of the ancient literary imagination. His second book, The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination (The University of Chicago Press, 2010) looked at how poets from antiquity to the twentieth century engage with the lives of other animals. It received the 2011 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. He has published and lectured widely in the fields of poetry, poetics, animal studies, and the environmental humanities.
