Rachel Falconer is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Lausanne. She has a chequered background, having grown up in Glasgow, Toronto, and Chappaqua, New York. She studied Classics at Yale University, and English at Oxford, and eventually she ended up teaching at the University of Sheffield, for more than 15 years. She has an abiding fascination with descent journeys into the underworld. Her first book examined the myth of Orpheus in Milton’s writing. In 2005, she published what is probably her largest book, Hell in Contemporary Literature a study of descents to Hell in a range of contemporary writing, both fiction and testimony. A central idea of the book is that Hell is still a concept that is deeply rooted in the western imagination, whether secular or religious. Even more importantly, the descent into a ground zero experience, and return to narrate the tale, is still a mythic structure we draw upon to shape our lives, individually and collectively. Mapping real events as mythic descent journeys can be dangerous, polarising and risks demonising the other; but recognising an experience as Hell can also be a way of achieving artistic and psychological control, perspective and creaturely empathy for others’ suffering She has explored these ideas further in two recent volumes, a co-edited collection of essays entitled A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature, and a monograph titled Seamus Heaney, Virgil and the Good of Poetry.