Manya Lempert is an Assistant Professor of English literature. She received her B.A. in English and French from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, which she studies in conjunction with ancient and modern philosophy and theories of evolution. She’s interested in the role that chance plays in both tragedy and evolutionary biology. Why have scientists, philosophers, and literary critics been so reluctant to include chance in their theories? More generally, Lempert's research and teaching involve European modernism, tragedy, and the ethics of reading. She is currently thinking about the history of nihilism in philosophy and fiction. She is also completing her book, The Moment Was All: Tragedy and the Modernist Novel, which contends that Darwin’s vision of nature inspired authors across Europe to re-imagine tragedy as a clash between human and nonhuman time scales. Lempert argues that modernist writers of tragedy departed from a philosophical tradition that defined the genre in terms of reconciliation and progress; modernists instead located in Greek tragedy a much-needed alternative to philosophy's sanguine figurations of conflict, suffering, and loss. Lempert's book treats works by Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Fernando Pessoa, Clarice Lispector, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett and finds that modernism generates its own tragic philosophy.