Mary Harper received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a dissertation on Gérard de Nerval and the nineteenth-century European "voyage en Orient." Her current research projects include a study of the narratives of nineteenth-century European travellers to Egypt, with particular focus on questions of gender, colonialism, and the interplay of ethnography and aesthetics. She has published articles on Gérard de Nerval's Voyage en Orient and "Temple d'Isis," Delacroix's "Femmes d'Alger," and nineteenth-century French literature and historiography. Her teaching at Princeton University has included courses on nineteenth-century European literature and culture, the modern French novel, and Orientalism.