guadalupe carrillo 
Guadalupe Carrillo is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the English Department. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 2005 with a B.A. in both English and Political Science. Her interests include 20th and 21st century American literature, minority literature, theory of the novel, narrative, and Disability Studies. Her dissertation examines the relationship between narrative realism and US minority and Global South literature, specifically focusing on the portrayal of disability and marginality, raising questions about the politics of representation
kenny ligda 
Kenneth Ligda is a fifth-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.
mike benveniste 
Mike Benveniste is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the English Department, working on the relationship between American prose fiction and criticism from the mid-twentieth century to the present. He is especially interested in the afterlives of realism and the social novel, and more broadly, focuses on theories of fiction, the history of the novel, and descriptive narratology. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees from UC Santa Barbara before coming to Stanford.
alex woloch, director
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.
