Research Bio

Nicholas Paige is a scholar of early modern and Enlightenment French literature whose research combines literary history with quantitative and digital methods. His work examines how narrative form evolves through cultural and technological change, using data-driven analysis to trace the rise, competition, and decline of formal devices across centuries of fiction. He is best known for *Technologies of the Novel: Quantitative Data and the Evolution of Literary Systems* (2021), a pioneering study that applies statistical sampling to nearly 2,000 novels to model the evolution of narrative forms. His earlier book, *Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel* (2011), explored the emergence of fictionality in pre-Revolutionary France and received the ASECS Louis Gottschalk Prize. Paige’s current work extends his quantitative approach to other art forms, including painted landscapes and aesthetic discourse, to propose new frameworks for cultural evolution.

He is Professor in the Department of French at UC Berkeley, where he is also serving as department chair. He teaches courses on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, the theory of the novel, film, and digital humanities.

Research Expertise and Interest

17th and 18th century French literature and culture, history and theory of the novel, quantitative literary history and digital humanities, history of aesthetics, cinema (French New Wave)