is professor of art and archeology at Princeton University, and may just be the single most important theorist on postmodernity in the arts at this point in time. He studied English literature and art history at Princeton, and afterwards became involved with the Whitney Museum study program. In 1983, having yet to reach the age of 30, he wrote the seminal masterpiece The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, in which he announced the beginning of the postmodern era. He received his Ph.D. in art history at the City University of New York in 1990, and based Compulsive Beauty (1993) on his dissertation on surrealist art and psychoanalytical theory. He also published The Return of the Real (1996), which deals once again with postmodernity, and Design and Crime (2002), which demonstrates the omnipresence of design in everyday life. His most recent works include Prosthetic Gods (2004), his return to psychoanalysis, and Pop Art (2005). Foster regularly writes about art in newspapers and magazines such as the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, October and New Left Review.