Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) was a playwright, critic, and philosopher of the German Enlightenment. His plays include Miss Sara Sampson, Minna von Barnhelm, Emilia Galotti, and Nathan the Wise. In addition to the Hamburg Dramaturgy, Lessing is known for his masterpiece of aesthetic theory, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry.
Wendy Arons is professor of drama at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing: The Impossible Act (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and co-editor, with Theresa J. May, of Readings in Performance and Ecology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Sara Figal's research centers on eighteenth-century German literature and history. She is the author of Heredity, Race, and the Birth of the Modern (Routledge, 2011 and 2008) and co-editor, with Mark Larrimore, of The German Invention of Race
