Rose is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught for many years and where he has twice served as department chair. From 1989 to 1984 he was Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), the systemwide humanities center which is located on the Irvine campus. During this period he held faculty appointments at both UCI and UCSB. Before coming to California in 1977, he was Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and, before that, Associate Professor of English at Yale.

Educated at Princeton; Merton College, Oxford; and Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in English literature in 1967, Rose has won many fellowships and awards including two NEH Fellowships. In addition to numerous essays and reviews, he has published three important books on Renaissance literature, Heroic Love (Harvard UP, 1968); Shakespearean Design (Harvard UP, 1972); and Spenser's Art (Harvard UP, 1975). He has also published a historical novel, Golding's Tale (Walker, 1972); a prize-winning study of science fiction, Alien Encounters (Harvard UP, 1982); and edited many collections of scholarly essays for Prentice-Hall and other publishers. In 1998 he published The Norton Shakespeare Workshop, a CD-Rom designed to accompany The Norton Shakespeare.

Rose has been active as an expert witness and consultant in film and television copyright matters since 1980. During that time he has been involved in more than thirty cases including recently Danjaq v. Sony, a widely-publicized case concerning the James Bond movies. His experiences as an expert led to his scholarly interest in the history of copyright. In addition to a number of essays on copyright history, he has published a well-known study of the emergence of copyright in Britain in the eighteenth century, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Harvard UP, 1993), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

This event is cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Department of English.