Dr. Göran Blix

Biography

Göran Blix studies the tradition of nineteenth-century French prose writing in the context of major historical and political developments. His research interests include romanticism, realism, literary aesthetics, historical imagination, politics of the novel, ecocriticism, and animal studies. He has published articles on Balzac, Hugo, Michelet, Flaubert, Tocqueville, the Goncourt brothers, and Zola. His book, 'From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archeology' (2008), examines the impact of nascent archaeology on modern secular attitudes towards death, memory, and immortality. Blix earned his B.A. in Literature from Harvard College in 1996, a DEA from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1998, and a Ph.D. in French from Columbia University in 2003. He joined the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University in 2003 and is currently completing a book on the fraught relationship between literature and democratization in nineteenth-century France. Blix also engages with environmental humanities through projects like 'Ecoapathy Biophilia' and 'Thinking Animals: Posthuman Fables in the Age of Darwin.'

Research Interests