Michael Cotsell was an undergraduate in the English Honors Program at the then University of Rhodesia (now the University of Zimbabwe). He was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship for post-graduate study in Britain and attended the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham. His M.A. dissertation was on the Elizabethan history play, his Ph.D. on Charles Dickens. He then taught for thirteen years at the University of Ulster and in adult education at Magee College, Derry. He spent a year at the SUNY School in Oneonta, NY. He joined the University of Delaware in 1987. Books include A Companion to Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Barbara Pym, The Theater of Trauma and the e-book The Sound and the Fury. He was Associate Editor of The Dickens Companions series and originating General Editor of the English Literature and the Wider World series for which he edited the volume Creditable Warriors: English Literature and the Wider World 1830-70.