Wendy Olmsted is author of Rhetoric: An Historical Introduction (2006), which analyzes texts by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Bacon John Milton and others in light of their revisions of rhetorical invention and inquiry. She has also written The Imperfect Friend (2008) on friendship and emotion in the works of Sir Philip Sidney and John Milton along with articles on the Odyssey, Cicero’s De Officiis, Machiavelli’s The Prince, The Faerie Queene, and The Old Arcadia. She focuses on ancient and Renaissance rhetoric, literature and social history, and she teaches Homer, Herodotus, Augustine, Milton, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen among others. She is currently interested in ancient and Renaissance representations of “the other” or “the stranger” and in how people of different estates, genders, or social contexts engage (or fail to engage) with one another.