Franco Moretti

Franco Moretti (born 1950 in Sondrio) is an Italian literary scholar, trained as a Marxist critic, whose work focuses on the history of the novel as a "planetary form". He is currently a senior advisor at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English (and, by courtesy, of German Studies) at Stanford University in California, where he also founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab. Moretti has written several books, including Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (1998), Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005), Distant Reading (2013), and The Bourgeois (2013). His recent work is notable for importing, not without controversy, quantitative methods from the social sciences into domains that have traditionally belonged to the humanities. To date, his books have been translated into fifteen languages.