Presley has an M.A. and specializes in Germanic languages, literature, and history. In the following essay, Presley discusses history, memory, and the interpretation of evidence in Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink.

Tom Stoppard has earned the reputation for being a playwright of wit and intellect, even though he has never gone to university. In Hapgood (1988), for example, he experiments with applying quantum physics to human behavior. In Arcadia (1993), he cleverly mixes literary history with mathematical chaos theory. For his next play, Stoppard revisited the material of an earlier radio play, In the Native State (1991), and rewrote it as the stage play Indian Ink (1995). Indian Ink does not deal explicitly with the mathematical and scientific theories that play such a large part in Hapgood and Arcadia, but Stoppard does retain the philosophical implications these theories have on the "soft sciences" of history, literature, and sociology. Mary A. Doll...