Björn Quiring is an Assistant Professor at the Peter-Szondi-Institut for Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. He received his PhD in 2007 from the Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder with an award-winning thesis entitled: Shakespeare’s Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama published in German in 2009 and in English translation just a few weeks ago. From 2009 until 2012 he was an Assistant Professor in a DFG-Sonderforschungsbereich at the LMU München. He has edited the book Theatrum Mundi : die Metapher des Welttheaters von Shakespeare bis Beckett in 2013, and together with Armen Avanessian the volume Abyssus intellectualis: spekulativer Horror also in 2013. Currently he is preparing another edited volume entitled “If Then the World a Theatre Present…”: Revisions of the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor in Early Modern England. His research focusses on problems between law and literature, religious and political representations, and on Shakespeare, Milton and Joyce, on Walter Benjamin and Hans Blumenberg.