Catherine Toal received her PhD from Harvard University. Her dissertation was awarded the University's prizes in Nineteenth-Century Literature and American Literature in 2002.  She has held a Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, where she taught literary and critical theory and nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and American literature.

Classes Taught at ECLA:

AY Core Courses: The School of Greece; Legitimacy in Modernity (coordinator); Property (coordinator)
PY Core Courses: Introduction to Marx; Reading Freud; Foucault; The French Revolution; Shakespeare's Hamlet; Objectivity
Electives: The Rise of the Novel; Theories of Narrative; Reading Henry James; Louis-Ferdinand Céline; The Enlightenment Bildungsroman; The King James Bible; Flaubert and Realism

PY Projects Supervised at ECLA:

Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project
Concepts of Authorship and the Postmodern Novel
Theories of Dramatic Language in Modernist Aesthetics
Nineteenth-Century French Poetry

General Teaching Interests:

The Novel; Theories of Narrative; Psychoanalysis; Critical Theory

Publications:

"Some Things Which Could Never Have Happened": Fiction, Identification, and Benito Cereno, Nineteenth-Century Literature 61. 1 (2006) 32-66.

"Corrections: Contemporary American Melancholy', special issue on 'Culture and Melancholy," Journal of European Studies 33. 130-1 (2003). 305-323.

"Control Experiment: Edgeworth's Critique of Rousseau's Educational Theory," An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and her Contexts, ed. Chris Fauske and Heidi Kaufmann, (Newark DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004).

"F.R. Leavis," Dictionary of European Critical and Cultural Theorists (Charlotte NC: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2001).

"The Summit of Violence': Cruelty in the Work of Artaud, Blanchot and Bataille," Paroles Gelées 18. 2. (2000), 64-77.