Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. His ten books have won numerous awards and been translated into seventeen languages worldwide. He is author of The Slave Ship: A Human History, which inspired of Naomi Wallace’s prize-winning play, The Liquid Plain. He is currently writing a play with Wallace entitled The Return of Benjamin Lay, about the eighteenth-century revolutionary abolitionist who performed public guerrilla theatre to humiliate slave-owners. His book (with Peter Linebaugh), The Many-Headed Hydra, is the basis of a play being written by Carmen Aguirre for the Stratford Festival in Canada.