Sylvester Cruz is a doctoral student in the English department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He is a third culture adult, having been raised as a dual citizen of both the United States and the Republic of South Africa, and earned his undergraduate degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz. His primary research interests are the drama, literature, and poetry of the Early Modern period, as well as the history of ethics, interpretation, and the emotions. He is especially interested in how biblical hermeneutics shaped the intersection of allegorical literature and early modern affect theory, as well as how the tradition of Roman Stoicism informed humanist literary and philosophical texts.