Profile

Grace Yan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French and Italian. Before coming to Princeton, she received 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 dissertation, titled « Doctrines sécularisées : le péché originel dans les romans naturalistes du XIXe siècle », focuses on the transposition of theological doctrines related to original sin in the works of the Goncourt brothers, Zola, Daudet, Mirbeau, and Descaves. She examines the non-religious equivalents of original sin in the domains of physiology and the social sciences, which participate in the creation of a secularized “religion”, which has its own systematic “theology”.