Joseph Harris studied French and German at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he later wrote his PhD thesis on cross-dressing in seventeenth-century France. After teaching in Cambridge, he started as a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has worked ever since. He has written two books and numerous articles on such topics as gender, onstage laughter, dramatic spectatorship, death and violence, and misanthropy, and edited various collective words on
religion and seventeenth-century theatre, identification, imagined afterlives, and Racine's tragedy Andromaque. He is co-editor of the journal French Studies.