Albrecht Classen was born in 1956 near Bad Hersfeld in Northern Hesse. He studied at the universities of Marburg  and Erlangen (Germany), Millersville, PA (USA), Oxford (Great Britain), Salamanca (Spain), Urbino (Italy), and Charlottesville, VA (USA). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1986.  He has a broad range of research interests covering the history of German and European literature and culture from about 800 to 1800. In more than 100 scholarly books and well over 700 articles he has explored the wide range of medieval and early modern culture; focusing, most recently, on topics such as the forest, water, prostitution, trailing, imagination, pleasure, gender, toleration and tolerance, xenology, and paradigm shifts. But he also pays close attention to contemporary conditions, including politics, economy, sports, and literature. He is also a poet of his own rights and has so far published nine volumes of his own texts in German, most recently: Hawaiische Impressionen (2013) and Sonora: harter Klang (2015).  He is an active contributor to the literary journal Trans-Lit2, for which he also serves as the book review editor. For many years he has written poetry and has published nine volumes so far, apart from many contributions to Trans-Lit2 and other journals. In 2016 he was selected as a member of the PEN-Zentrum deutschsprachiger Autoren im Ausland (PEN Center of German-Speaking Authors Abroad). In 2018 he published his first volume of satires, Amerikanische Satiren (Leipzig: Engelsdorfer Verlag).