Nicholas Dames is a specialist in the novel, with particular attention to the novel of the nineteenth century in Britain and on the European continent; his interests also include novel theory, the history of reading, and the aesthetics of prose fiction from the seventeenth century to the present.  He is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (Oxford, 2001), which was awarded the Sonya Rudikoff Prize by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association; and The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford, 2007).  His articles have appeared in The Henry James Review, Representations, Novel, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Narrative, Victorian Studies, n+1, and Public Books, as well as edited volumes such as Blackwell’s Companion to the Victorian Novel, Oxford’s Encyclopedia of British Literature, Cambridge’s History of Literary Criticism, the Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, and the Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen.  He has been a recipient of Columbia’s Presidential Teaching Award (2005), a Charles Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2005-6), the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award (2008), and the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching (2013).  In 2009 he served as Chair of the MLA’s Executive Division on Prose Fiction.  His current project is a history of the chapter, from the textual cultures of late antiquity, particularly the editorial and scribal practices of early Christianity, to the modern novel.