Howard Eiland is co-author, with Michael W. Jennings, of the first English-language biography of Walter Benjamin, an influential German philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist who died in 1940 while in flight from the Nazis. He is co-editor of Benjamin’s Selected Writings (vols. 2–4) and has translated a number of Benjamin’s works, including The Arcades Project (with Kevin McLaughlin), Berlin Childhood around 1900, On Hashish, Early Writings: 1910–1917, and Origin of the German Trauerspiel, all published by Harvard University Press. He has also published articles on twentieth-century literature and philosophy, and a volume of Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz. A graduate of Northwestern and Yale universities, he taught literature from 1983 to 2014 at MIT, where he received the 2011 Levitan Prize for Excellence in Teaching.