Christopher Lane, a British-American literary critic and intellectual historian, is the Pearce Miller Research Professor of Literature at Northwestern University. He is known for his work on 19th- and 20th-century literature and psychology, particularly its emphasis on emotion and desire. A Victorianist by training, he has secondary expertise in 19th-century psychology, psychiatry, and intellectual history.

Born and educated in London, Lane received his Ph.D. from the University of London. He is the author of four books: The Ruling Passion, The Burdens of Intimacy, Hatred and Civility, and Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, now out in French, Japanese, and Korean, with chapters also forthcoming in Danish and Chinese. He has also edited two books: The Psychoanalysis of Race and Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis.

Lane's work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, New York Sun, Herald Tribune, and New Statesman and Society. 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, and the International Literary Quarterly.

His work has been supported by fellowships from the British Academy, the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others. His next book, a study of Victorian agnosticism, is called The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (forthcoming in Fall 2010 with Yale University Press).

He writes a blog for Psychology Today called "Side Effects."