Deborah Lesko Baker is Professor of French at Georgetown University, where she has been the Chair of the French Department since 1997.  A specialist in Early Modern lyric poetry and poetics in the Petrarchan and Classical traditions, Professor Lesko Baker earned her A.B. degree in French from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in French from Yale University.  She is the author of The Subject of Desire: Petrarchan Poetics and the Female Voice in Louise Labé (Purdue University Press, 1996)  and Narcissus and the Lover:  Recovery and Reinvention in Maurice Scève’s ‘Délie’ (Stanford French and Italian Studies, 1986), as well as articles on Renaissance poetry and mythic structures in literary texts.  Most recently, she is the editor and co-translator (with poet Annie Finch) of the first bilingual edition of Louise Labé’s Complete Poetry and Prose,  published by the University of Chicago Press in May 2006.  In 2003 Professor Lesko was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Government for her contributions to the promotion of French language, literature, and culture in the United States.