< BACK
Board of Trustees
Sir Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL
Sir Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL, a renowned Shakespearean and eco-critic, is currently a Professor of Environmental Humanities in Global Futures, at Arizona State University's School of Sustainability and the College of Liberal Arts. He has been a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge; King Alfred Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool; Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, University of Warwick; Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London; Harkness Fellow, Harvard University; and Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, where he has retained a Senior Research Fellowship. He has held visiting posts at Yale and UCLA. He is a Fellow and former Vice-President of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Bate is an international leader in green thinking and applied humanities, with scholarly expertise in sustainability as well as in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, Romanticism, biography and life-writing, contemporary poetry, visual culture and theater history. Bate is also a biographer, critic, broadcaster, poet, playwright, novelist and scholar. He has written twenty books, many of which have won major prizes. In 2015, he became the youngest person ever to have been knighted for services to literary scholarship.
David Campbell
David Campbell worked for the first half of his publishing career as a French publisher in Paris, at Gallimard and at Hachette where he was International Publishing Director 1983-1991, and Publisher and Managing Director of Editions du Chene 1985-1991. In 1980 he founded editions Scala and from 1998 to 2015 was Chair of Scala Publishers, the leading museum publishers.
In 1991 he bought and revived Everyman’s Library of which he is the Publisher, now part of the Alfred A.Knopf-Doubleday Group. In 1998 he created the Millennium Library Trust and raised £9,000,000 to donate three hundred specially printed Everyman books to every UK state secondary school (4,300 schools) and to 1,700 schools in seventy-seven countries of the developing world. In 2007 he was made a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Alexandra Jacobus
Alexandra (Zan) Jacobus, LCSW (she/her) has been in practice as a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, New York for over twenty years. Previously she worked in NYC DOE high schools for more than ten years, first as a teacher of English as a Second Language, then as a school social worker. She is also a poet.
Victoria Gray
Victoria Gray is a writer and former university lecturer in Medieval Literature. She founded, and is the Executive Director of, the UK charity Give a Book, which supports reading projects in the hardest places, notably in prisons and disadvantaged communities. She is a Trustee of the charity, Book Clubs in Schools, and is an Hon. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Merve Emre
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. Her work has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Quebec, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, where she was a fellow from 2021-22. In 2022, she served as one of the judges of the International Booker Prize. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.
Joe Versace
Joe Versace is a principal and senior advisor in the New York office of AB Bernstein, where he oversees a global investment management advisory practice and serves as Chair of the Firm’s Foundations and Institutions Advisory Board.
A graduate of Boston University, he holds a certificate in corporate governance from The Wharton School’s Avery Institute and currently serves as Chair of the Board for Westbeth Artists Housing, a nonprofit housing and commercial complex in New York City.
Joe has held several arts and civic leadership positions and continues to advise numerous not-for-profit organizations, as well as private corporate and family advisory boards; in 2003 – 2004, he was a fellow in the Partnership for New York’s David Rockefeller Civic Fellowship program.
Prior to joining AB in 2005 he held executive and management positions at IBM and Microsoft and from 2011 – 2015 Joe served as an assistant professor on the faculty of Columbia University’s Graduate School of International and Public Policy.