Patrick Bray

Essayist and professor of French literature at University College London (UCL). Originally from California, Patrick Bray studied French literature at Cornell before earning a PhD at Harvard. Before joining UCL, he taught at several universities, including Ohio State University. His research focuses on the relationship between literature, theory, and modernity.

He is the author of The Novel Map: Space and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction and The Price of Literature: The French Novel’s Theoretical Turn, both from Northwestern University Press. He has also just published Oser le mauvais goût. Le pari de Stendhal (Station Zapata), an acclaimed essay that invites us to rethink aesthetic hierarchies and the criteria of literary judgment.