Noam Scheindlin joined the English department in 2010.  He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.  His doctoral dissertation, “The Bungled One: Failure and the Fictional Impetus,” inquires into the relationship between the intimate, solitary experience of being a person, and its expression in language.   In exploring the Bible, and works by Marcel Proust, Herman Melville, and Georges Perec, the study puts forward the notion that it is the “failure,” to fully express who one is, that results in the consciousness proper to reading and writing fiction.  Scheindlin is also at work on a study of democracy in the work of Herman Melville.  His interests include phenomenology and hermeneutics; 20th Century French and American Poetry; and the theory of the novel.  He has contributed to the volume The Proust Project, edited by André Aciman.