Florence Vatan is Professor in the Department of French & Italian and Affiliate of the German Section of German, Nordic and Slavic. She specializes in nineteenth-century poetry and fiction; literature and science (psychology, medicine); literature and philosophy; twentieth-century Austrian literature; and European intellectual and cultural history. She writes and publishes in English, German and French, and received her doctorate in Germanistik at the University of Paris III (Sorbonne) and her doctorate in French at the University of Chicago.