A native of California’s San Joaquin Valley, Dean de la Motte has degrees in comparative literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; he also studied at the Université de Poitiers and the Deutsche Schule of Middlebury College. The co-editor of Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France and Approaches to Teaching Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, he has published a wide range of articles on nineteenth-century French literature and culture and numerous essays on the teaching of literature. From 2000 to 2014 he worked as a chief academic officer; a ‘recovering administrator’, he now teaches courses in French and English, including an annual seminar entitled Scribbemania: The Brontës and the Passion of Writing. The father of two grown children, de la Motte lives and works in Newport, Rhode Island, and spends most summers in France. Oblivion is his first novel.