Edward Muir is the Clarence L. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University and has been elected to the Academia Europaea and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Educated at public schools and universities, he has taught at open-admission colleges and highly selective universities, giving him an appreciation for the challenges of contemporary education that the AHA faces. His research asks two questions: how did Europeans in the Renaissance create some of the earliest functioning communities, on the one hand, and how did selfish individualism and factional violence pull those communities apart, on the other? His principal publications include Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice; Mad Blood Stirring:  Vendetta in Renaissance Italy; Ritual in Early Modern Europe; and The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera. In the textbook, The West: Encounters and Transformations, he explored with co-authors with Brian Levack and Meredith Veldman how to place European history in a global context. As past president of the two principal academic societies in his special field, he looks forward to the greater opportunities for productive change in education and research afforded by the AHA.