Victoria Baena

Degrees

MA, MPhil, PhD Comparative Literature (Yale University)

BA, History and Literature (Harvard College)
 

Research interests

My research focuses on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel, narrative theory, and the politics of aesthetics from a comparative perspective. These preoccupations have led me to engage in particular with Marxist and feminist theories, histories of empire and (anti-)colonialism, and questions of translation.

In my first book, Provinces of the Mind: The Modern Novel on Provincial Time (forthcoming with Chicago’s “Thinking Literature” series), I make a case for the provinces, rather than city or capital, as the key setting both dramatized in and transformed by the modern novel. The book examines a range of novels in English and French (from around 1800 to 1933) that scrutinized and sometimes challenged a reigning conception of the provinces as backwards, behind, or even out of time. In taking stock of modernity's unruly, uneven sense of time, the book also offers the provincial as a conceptual tool: a heuristic for engaging in comparative literary history at scales below as well as beyond the nation-state.

My second book, A Sentimental Education: The Unlikely Friendship of Amélie Bosquet & Gustave Flaubert, will be published with Yale in March 2027. It recounts the intimate, lively, and often contentious friendship in letters between Gustave Flaubert and Amélie Bosquet, a socialist novelist and feminist activist in mid-nineteenth-century France. In their passionate debates about art and politics, they forged two dramatically opposed conceptions of the place of the writer in the modern world - convictions that, as I show, would ultimately tear them apart. 
 

Selected honors and fellowships

Fellow, Institute for the Arts and Humanities (UVA) (2026–2028)

Cambridge Humanities Research Grant (2025)

Camargo Foundation Fellowship, Cassis, France (2024)

Finalist, Malcolm Bowie Prize, Society for French Studies (2024)

Shortlist, Tony Lothian First Biography Prize, Biographers’ Club (2023)

Kathy Chamberlain Award, Women Writing Women’s Lives Association (2023)

Finalist, Royal Portrait Society Critical Writing Prize (2023)

Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship, New York Public Library (2022)

Naomi Schor Memorial Award, Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association (2019)
 

Selected publications

"Genres of Revolt: Literary Afterlives of 1848," special issue of boundary2, co-edited with Clare Pettitt (forthcoming)

“The Task of the Translator: Influence Beyond the Monolingual Condition,” Textual Practice (2025)

"Cartographies of Region and Empire: Scaling Le tour de la France par deux enfants (and its afterlives)," Dix-Neuf (2023)

​"History's Borrowed Languages: Emily Brontë, Karl Marx, and the Novel Of 1848," ELH (2023)

“Romanesque Commitments: Amélie Bosquet’s Narrative Theory and Popular Aesthetics,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies (2021)

“Labor, Thought, and the Work of Authorship: Virginia Woolf and Hannah Arendt,” ​Diacritics (2020)
 

Translations

Marielle Macé, "Existence as Style," Dibur (2025)

Abdeslam Ziou Ziou, “The Sanctuary of the Mad,” Parapraxis Magazine (2025)

Annie Ernaux, “Rouen’s Municipal Library, 1959–1964, or, The Formative Years,” The Paris Review (2024)

Marie NDiaye, “Step of a Feral Cat,” in Visible: Text + Image, Two Lines Press (2022)
 

Other writing

I also regularly write essays and reviews for venues like The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Baffler, Boston Review, Dissent, and the L.A. Review of Books.