Evelyne Ender holds a Doctorat ès lettres in Comparative Literature from the University de Geneva, where she studied French, English as well as German literature. She started her career in Switzerland, and then transferred to the United States to pursue interdisciplinary research in the field of memory and to be visiting associate professor at Yale. She also taught at Harvard and MIT before being appointed as a Professor of French at University of Washington in Seattle. She came to Hunter College in 2006 and was appointed to the Graduate Center at CUNY in the French and Comparative Literature departments in 2007. She writes in French and in English, and has lectured widely in the United States and in Europe on questions of memory, of gender, and of literary interpretation. She is currently a member of the Mellon Seminar on family at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Her first book, Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria was published by Cornell Univ. Press in 1995. She won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, awarded by the MLA, for her second book, Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography (2005). Among recent publications are an article on déjà-vu for Science in context, an essay on The Wings of the Dove for the Blackwell Companion to Henry James, and a chapter on the nineteenth-century lyric in French Literary History: A Global Approach (forthcoming, Columbia University Press). She has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth century authors such as George Sand, George Eliot, Amiel, Flaubert, Hardy, James, Freud, Proust, Annie Ernaux, and on subjects such as narcissism, illness, trauma, family, and gender.

Professor Ender has taught graduate courses on such topics as gender and illness, scenes of childhood, stories of hysteria, fictions of desire, memory across the disciplines, literary representations of memory, and nineteenth- and twentieth century French poetry. While questions of consciousness, body/mind, and literature’s intersection with current psychological and neuroscientific interests remain central to her research, she is preparing a book on the broader issue of the place of literary reading in academia. Drawing from her teaching experience as well as from theories of reading and practical examples, she examines the demise of close readings as well as its relevance and potential for renewal in contemporary culture.