Christopher Lane (Ph.D. University of London), a London-born literary critic and intellectual historian, is Professor of English at Northwestern University, near Chicago. A Victorianist by training, he has secondary expertise in 19th-century psychology, psychiatry, and intellectual history, and has held the Pearce Miller Research Professorship of Literature at Northwestern.
He is the author of five books: The Ruling Passion (Duke, 1995), The Burdens of Intimacy (Chicago, 1999), Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England (Columbia, 2004), and Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007), winner of the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing (France), translated into French, Spanish, Danish, Korean, and Japanese. His latest book, a study of religious doubt and fundamentalism in Britain and the U.S., is called The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (Yale, March 2011).
Lane is also the editor of The Psychoanalysis of Race (Columbia, 1998) and a co-editor of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (Chicago, 2001). His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, Huffington Post, New York Sun, Herald Tribune, Chronicle Review, New Statesman, and New Humanist. He has also published more than fifty peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Raritan, Novel, Victorian Studies, Common Knowledge, Theory and Psychology, the Oxford Literary Review, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and the International Literary Quarterly.
His work has been supported by fellowships from the British Academy, the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and several more.
He writes a popular blog for Psychology Today called “Side Effects.” He also writes regularly for the Huffington Post.
