Christoph Irmscher is the author of "Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science," the first new biography in several decades of the controversial 19th-century celebrity scientist Louis Agassiz, Darwin's nemesis. Inventor of scientific fieldwork, promoter of the Ice Age, describer of jellyfish, and self-appointed expert on racial classifications, Agassiz divides minds even today. This biography restores him to his central place in the history of science and sheds new light on his darker sides, too. Kirkus Reviews has declared "Agassiz" a "thoroughly satisfying biography," and Megan Marshall, author of "The Peabody Sisters," has called it "as exuberant as its brilliant but wrong-headed subject."Christoph is a Professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of several books, among them a biography of the poet Henry Wadworth Longfellow, "Longfellow Redux" (2006). He lives in Bloomington with his wife, the composer Lauren Bernofsky, his children Nick and Julia, and three extremely entitled cats, Jeremy, Oliver, and Annie (the latter named after the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley's "Little Orphant Annie").