Profile

Grace Yan is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French and Italian. Before coming to Princeton, she earned her B.A. in French Language and Literature and her M.A. in French Literature at the University of Toronto. She is interested in secularization in literature and the use of religious motifs and logic in naturalist novels of the second half of the 19^th century. Her research focuses on the transposition of theological doctrines related to original sin into non-religious domains such as physiology and the social sciences in the creation of a secularized “religion”.