The Narrative Lab is a space where faculty and students come together to study narrative theory and narratives across all periods, genres, and media, from ancient texts to video games. We are interested in how narratives are created, adapted, interpreted, and put to use in the world. Each semester, three to four student research fellows learn and work alongside a small group of faculty from humanities departments, through weekly meetings and lively discussions. Our goal is to create and to critically examine narratives about narratives.

Interested in working as a student research fellow in the Narrative Lab? Check out the Student Applications page for more information.

Meet the Narrative Lab Team

Yoon Sun Lee

Yoon Sun Lee is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English at Wellesley and the author of Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford, 2004), Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life (Oxford, 2013), and The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels (Penn, 2023). She works on the history and theory of the novel, British Romanticism, Asian American literature, and narrative theory, with a particular interest in structuralism. Her essays can be found in ELH, PMLA, Representations, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Studies in Romanticism, Keats-Shelley Journal, MLQ (“Peripheral Realisms”), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory, The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Race and Romanticism, as well as other journals and collections. She also co-edited with Kent Puckett, “Proxy Wars,” for Representations (2023). She is the past president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, serves on the executive committee of the MLA’s Romanticism Forum and the prize committee for the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, and is co-convener, with Deidre Lynch, of the Novel Theory Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. She is the lead PI for a three-year Mellon Humanities grant called “Transforming Stories, Spaces, Lives.”

Josh Lambert

Josh Lambert is the Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and English, and director of the Jewish Studies Program, at Wellesley College. His books include Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (2014), The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature (2022), and the anthology How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (2020). He has taught as a visiting professor at Harvard and Princeton, and served as a member of the board of directors of the Association for Jewish Studies. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals, and will soon be starting a term as co-editor of Jewish Social Studies. He writes about books and culture for publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, Jewish Currents, Literary Hub, and Lilith.

Erez DeGolan

Erez DeGolan is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Wellesley College. His research centers classical rabbinic literature in Hebrew and Aramaic from between the first and seventh centuries (CE), combining textual, historical, and critical methods in studies of ancient and late-ancient rabbinic culture. His work has appeared in the Ancient Jew Review, Jewish Law Association Studies, the Journal of Textual Reasoning, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. At Wellesley, he is working on a book project, titled Rejoicing Rabbis: Emotions and Power in Roman Palestine, which explores the nexus between joy and political culture in rabbinic texts from Roman Palestine.