Alex Woloch
Director, CSN
Associate Professor of English
Alex Woloch works on the history of the novel and literary theory. His teaching is focused on nineteenth-century British literature and covers the broad development of the European and American novel. He is particularly interested in narrative realism and the question of representation in its literary, rhetorical and political dimensions. He is the author of The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton University Press, 2004) which attempts to reestablish the centrality of characterization -- the fictional representation of human beings -- within narrative poetics. He is also the co-editor, with Peter Brooks, of Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Yale University Press, 2000).
Margaret Cohen
Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization
Professor of French and Comparative Literature
Margaret Cohen's research has focused on the literature and culture of modernity. Her books include Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (1993), and The Sentimental Education of the Novel (1999), that was awarded the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione prize in French and Francophone literature. This book resurrected a forgotten genre of women's sentimental fiction that had a decisive impact on the history of the French novel in how it made sense of the impasses of the French Revolution through plots of thwarted love. She is currently writing The Adventure of the Sea, on how the history and representation of global ocean travel informed the development of the modern novel. Among her recent publications, she also edited a new version of the Norton critical edition of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
Franco Moretti
The Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Franco Moretti founded the Center for the Study of the Novel in 2000. He has written Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998), and Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005). Chief editor of The Novel (Princeton, 2006). He has given the Gauss seminars at Princeton and the Beckman lectures at Berkeley, is a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, a scientific advisor to the French Ministry of Research, and a member of the AAAS. He writes often for New Left Review, and his work has been translated in fifteen languages.
Miruna Stanica
Graduate Coordinator
Miruna Stanica is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Stanford, focusing on British literature of the eighteenth century. Her dissertation, titled Before Realism: the Eighteenth-Century Novel's Unruly Objects, examines how the early novel uses movable goods to experiment with form, plotting, and narration. Her research interests combine narrative theory and the study of material culture. She completed her B.A. in English at UC Berkeley.
Kenny Ligda
Graduate Coordinator
Kenneth Ligda is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the English Department. Though interested in the British novel from Fielding to (much of) the present, his concentration of study is on the 1920s through the late 1950s. His dissertation is on the intersection of humor and realism in such writers as George Orwell, Barbara Pym, Karel Čapek, Christopher Isherwood, and Robert Graves. Kenny also carries on a lively intrigue with science and films. He earned B.A.s in English and Danish from the University of Washington, after having also attended Whitman College and the University of Copenhagen. He taught English for one year in Prague.
Ed Finn
Graduate Coordinator
Ed Finn is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the English Department. He studies contemporary literature, new media and narrative across genres. He graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and certificates in Computer Science, Creative Writing and European Cultural Studies. Before returning to graduate school he worked as a journalist and freelance writer.
