Evelyne Ender holds a Doctorat ès lettres in Comparative Literature from the University of Geneva, where she was trained in interdisciplinary research and taught in the English Department as well as in the newly created MA in feminist studies. She held visiting appointments at Yale, Harvard, and MIT. Before joining Johns Hopkins, she was appointed as a Professor of French at the University of Washington (Seattle). For a decade, she served as a Professor of French at Hunter College and was co-appointed in the Ph.D. programs in French and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.

She is the author of Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria (1995) and ArchiTexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography (2005), which won the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. She is currently finishing a third book titled HandWriting: An Inner History. Based on the notion of graphology and the manuscripts of famous authors, it traces a history of creative gestures born at the cusp between manual and machine writing from an aesthetic and phenomenological perspective.

During her time on the editorial board of PMLA, she prepared, in collaboration with Deidre Lynch (Harvard University), a forum on Theories and Methodologies titled "Learning to Read." This project led to a further collaboration: two volumes of a special issue devoted to Cultures of Reading.

Evelyne Ender has published book chapters and articles in English and French defined by their joint commitment to literary studies and to existential questions; they embrace the work of major literary figures such as Proust, Virginia Woolf, Nerval, Flaubert and Baudelaire, George Sand, George Eliot, Henry James, Mallarmé, and Lou Andreas-Salomé. Her writings engage with themes such as illness in James’s The Wings of the Dove (The Blackwell Companion to Henry James), "Homesickness in an Expanding World: The Case of the Nineteenth-Century Lyric" (French Global: A New Approach to Literary History), eros in Sand ("Le Triomphe de l'Amour dans François le Champi"), masculinity in "Amiel: le Philosophe et le (Beau) Sexe," and déjà-vu (Science in Context). Written jointly with Serafina Lawrence, "Inside a Red Cover: Proust and the Art of Reading," proposes a reflection on reading, affect, and memory in the era of cognitive science (Proust and the Arts, 2015). Her essay on "Literature, Pedagogy, and the Power of Mimesis: On Teaching Maylis de Kerangal's The Heart" appeared in Homo Mimeticus II (2025) and "Annie Ernaux Up Close: On Trauma and Style" is scheduled for publication in MLN for 2025.

Professor Ender teaches courses on a range of topics, including French and English literature, medical humanities, and the relationship between literature and phenomenology. Her recent courses include:

Advanced Courses:

• Consciousness Revisited: French Literature and Phenomenology, from Rousseau to Sartre

• 1966, Before and After: French Theory

• Proust and the Science of Memory

• Stories of Hysteria

• In Search of the Human: Ways of Remembering (Co-taught with Professor Lawrence Wissow, M.D. MPH School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health)

• French Romanticism Across the Arts (taught in French)

• Physics and Metaphysics of Handwriting

First Year Seminars:

• Heart Matters

• Love and its Maladies

• Wired to Read: The Art and the Science of Reading

• Doctors and Patients: A Few Case-Studies