Julian Yates received his B.A. (Hons.) in English Language and Literature from St. Anne's College, Oxford University in 1990 and PhD in English Literature from UCLA in 1996. He specializes in Medieval and Renaissance British Literature, literary theory, material culture studies, and questions of ecology / environmental humanities. He is the author of some thirty five essays on Medieval and Renaissance literature and culture, questions of ecology, the posthuman, and literary theory; and author or editor of four books: Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minnesota, 2003), which was a finalist for the Modern Language Association's Best First Book Prize in 2003; What's the Worst Thing You Can Do To Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), co-authored with Richard Burt; Object-Oriented Environs in Early Modern England (Punctum Books, 2016), co-edited with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen; and Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 

His research has been supported by grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the American Philosophical Society. He is currently embarked on two projects: a book on Shakespeare's dramaturgy and contemporary ecologies of refuge titled Cosmopolitical Shakespeares; and, with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, a study of the legacies of Noah's Ark in contemporary accounts of global warming, Noah's Arkive: Groundless Reading from the Beginning to the End of Time.