Undergraduate Humanities Forum Director
Professor of French and Francophone Studies

Andrea Goulet is Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies Department and the Program of Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include the modern French novel; science and literature; visual studies; spatial theory; urbanism; popular culture and the detective novel; and literature of the anthropocene.

Professor Goulet is the author of Optiques: the Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (2006) and Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Space and Science in French Crime Fiction (2016). She co-edited a volume on the BBC SciFi television series Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics (2018). Her article publications include work on French authors (Balzac, Hugo, Sue, Poe, Villiers, Huysmans, Maupassant, Gaboriau, Leroux, Lermina, Malet, Simon, Japrisot, Dantec) and topics like Franco-American Edisonades, Vidocq’s avatars, car culture and the noir, and the transnational urban mystery genre. She is currently writing a book called Shady Quakers, on nineteenth-century French representations of the Friends. 

Professor Goulet is Editor-in-Chief of the scholarly journal French Forum. She served for ten years as national Co-Chair of the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association and has co-directed Penn’s Humanities+Urbanism+Design initiative. In 2017, Professor Goulet received the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award. She has served once before as Director of the Humanities Undergraduate Forum: in 2016-2017, when the topic was “Translation.”