The writer and critic Terry Castle--described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today"-- has taught at Stanford University since 1983. Her scholarly interests include eighteenth-century British fiction, the Gothic novel, Jane Austen, the First World War, English art and culture of the 1920s and 1930s, autobiography and biography, and gay and lesbian writing. She has published eight books on diverse subjects, including Masquerade and Civilization (1986), The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), and the prize-winning collection, The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (2003). She is also a well-known essayist and has written frequently for the London Review of Books, Atlantic, New Republic, Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, and other periodicals. In 1997 she was named Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford.

Terry Castle began making art in the 1970s and 1980s--working mostly in watercolour, gouache, and pastels.  Over the past 10 years she has added photography, collage, and digital imaging to the mix. Castle has a website, Fevered Brain Productions (http://terry-castle-blog.blogspot.com), devoted to her artwork.   Her unusual imagery reflects her wide, even promiscuous, visual interests: she takes huge pleasure in surrealism, early photography and cinema, book illustration, music, architecture, modernism, graphic design, typography, outsider art, ephemera, and visual japery of all sorts.

In her spare time Castle collects books, music, and old postcards and is a miniature dachshund enthusiast.