Editor
Kevin McLaughlin
Kevin McLaughlin is George Hazard Crooker University Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study, Dean Emeritus of the Faculty at Brown University. He served as Dean of the Faculty from 2011-2022 at Brown University. He is currently the Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study at Brown. McLaughlin became the Editor of Novel: A Forum for Fiction in 2023. He has been the recipient of research grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. He is the author of four books, Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in 19th-Century Literature (Stanford UP, 1995); Paperwork: Literature and Mass Mediacy in the Age of Paper (U of Penn P, 2005); Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant (Stanford UP, 2014); and The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program (Fordham UP, 2023). McLaughlin is also the co-translator with Howard Eiland of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (Harvard UP, 1999).
Editorial Board
Nancy Armstrong
Nancy Armstrong is the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English. She has devoted her career to explaining how novels imagine a world that can be inhabited (or not) in specific ways by historically and culturally variable readerships. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 1987) argues that domestic fiction written by, for, or about women first imagined the forms of courtship, marriage, and household that serve as the conceptual units of the modern liberal state. Co-authored with Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (University of California Press, 1992) focuses on 17th- and 18th- century England and America and is considered a pioneering study in the field of transatlantic literary relations. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Harvard University Press, 1999) rethinks literary realism in relation to the new art of photography and the onset of mass visuality. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism 1719-1900 (Columbia University Press, 2006) defines the British novel as a cluster of formal strategies aimed at defending that individual and the household he or she occupies against excessive forms of individualism associated with alternative or sub-generic varieties of fiction, on the one hand, and forms of collectivity that would obliterate individual differences, on the other.
Timothy Bewes
Timothy Bewes is Professor of English at Brown University and an Associate Editor of Novel. He works on twentieth century and contemporary fiction, with a particular interest in the politics of aesthetics. His books include The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011), Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (2002) and Cynicism and Postmodernity (1997). His current work is attempting to think through the implications of understanding the novel not in formal terms but as a logic or a mode of thought, and to consider the way such an understanding may reverberate beyond our approach to literary criticism.
John Marx
John Marx is Professor and Chair of English at the University of California, Davis. He serves as an associate editor at NOVEL. His book Media U: A New History of the American University, co-authored with Mark Garrett Cooper, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2018. Work in progress from this project appears periodically online at http://humanitiesafterhollywood.org/. Marx is author of two other books as well as numerous articles on contemporary, postcolonial, and modernist novels, a list of which can be found here: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9571-2312
Lloyd Pratt
Lloyd Pratt is the Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature at St. John's College, University of Oxford. He taught at Harvard, Yale and Michigan State University before coming to Oxford, where he is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Rothermere American Institute. His research interests span American Literature, African American Literature, Literatures of the American South, The Novel, Theory and Criticism, Gender and Sexuality, History of the Book and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literatures in English. His 2016 work The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature examined how various nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger. He is also the author of Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.
Ellen Rooney
Ellen Rooney is Professor of English, Modern Culture and Media, and Gender Studies at Brown University. She is Associate Editor of Novel and Co-editor of Differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies. Rooney works on contemporary literary and cultural theory and nineteenth century British fiction. She is the author of Seductive Reasoning: Pluralism as the Problematic of Contemporary Literary Theory (1989) and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory (2006). Her current project, The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form, examines current debates on the nature of reading and its relation to efforts to think the nature of literary and other textual forms.
Assistant Editors
Olivia Kennison
Olivia is a Ph.D. Candidate in Slavic Studies and M.A. Candidate in Classics at Brown. Her dissertation concerns receptions of Greek tragedy during the Silver Age of Russian literature. She has been an Assistant Editor at NOVEL since 2023.
Jack Quirk
Jack Quirk is a sixth year Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Brown. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies, Law, Culture, and Humanities, Journal of Modern Literature, Law and Literature, and Modernism/modernity Print Plus.