Marie-Paule Tranvouez, a specialist of the nineteenth-century French novel, wrote her doctoral dissertation on Balzac using a narratological and semiotic approach. Her teaching interests include pedagogy, the French Novel, cultural studies and the autobiography as a genre. She is a co-author of the sixth edition of Ensemble: Culture et Société, a cultural textbook introducing students to contemporary French documents and media. With her colleague, Jean-Marie Schultz, she published Réseau: Communication, Intégration, Intersections, an innovative intermediate French textbook based on the notion of linguistic and cultural intersections. She was the Secretary of the Association for French Cultural Studies and has co-organized several colloquia on cultural studies at Wellesley College. She is currently the director of the French House.