Lynette Hunter is Professor of the History of Rhetoric and Performance. Previous positions include the Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Leeds ( UK ), and Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College , London . As someone interested in rhetoric, she has been able to explore writing and performance in an unusually interdisciplinary manner: after an early career as a scientist working in biochemistry, she turned to mainstream literary criticism (writing among others the classic study George Orwell, the search for a Voice 1984), and to humanities computing. After establishing the first undergraduate humanities computing degree courses in the UK, she developed a long-standing interest in food history into academic work in the history of publishing, culminating in a series of groundbreaking bibliographies on food, cookery and household work (Prospect Books), that have opened up enormous possibilities for women's studies, and a fascinating hypertext for the study of nineteenth century women's periodicals (Victorian Periodicals Project). Turning to performance studies in the early 1990s, and drawing on early work in the theatre, she has developed an international reputation for theory as performance, including the productions ‘Can a man be a woman', ‘Trying not to be a tragic subject' and ‘Face-work: coming to the end of the line', which were recently showcased at a major retrospective in Warsaw University. All of these works, and some more recent, relate to her on-going concern with Canadian writing and culture: publications include Outsider Notes: Feminist perspectives on Ideology, Writing and Publishing (1996). At the same time, during the 1990s, Lynette Hunter began to publish long-gestating work on the Renaissance, especially in the field of the history of science, medicine and rhetoric, and has co-edited the Arden Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . One of her current research projects is a study of early democratic rhetoric. Underlying these various fields, Lynette Hunter's research has consistently explored philosophical issues to do with the condition of women and with feminism, as well as the moral ethical concerns of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century philosophy and theory. Her book Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Computing, Science and the Arts (1999), and the rather more accessible Literary Value: Critical Power (2001) are good examples of her thinking in these areas. Much of her work at the moment is devoted to the study of aboriginal storytelling culture and society, especially in arctic regions of Canada . This area of oral performance is part of a larger research project into alternative methods of democratic communication, and the use of theatre for social and political questioning and resolution. Lynette Hunter is also a trained coach in Weihai Li Shi Quan Fa, an integrated system of Chinese Physical Culture, having studied for many years with Desmond Murray, president of the International Taoist Society.