Melissa Ganz received her Ph.D. in English Literature from Yale University and her J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She also has an M.A. in American Studies from Yale and an A.B. in English from Princeton. Her research explores connections between literature and legal culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Her book project, Binding the Vow: Fiction, Law, and Marriage in England, 1722-1814, examines the role of novels in debates about marriage, focusing on contract logic's implications for conjugal relations. Reading texts by authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Amelia Opie, and Jane Austen alongside treatises, pamphlets, essays, and speeches, the study offers the first full account of the relationship between nuptial law and early fiction. It also sheds light on questions concerning contractual obligation that persist to this day. An essay from this project (on Defoe's Moll Flanders) has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Melissa has also written essays on George Eliot and the practice of promising (ELH), on The Portrait of a Lady and the divorce debates (The Henry James Review), and on gender, sentiment, and storytelling in a sensational nineteenth-century murder trial (Yale Journal of Law & Feminism).
Melissa's teaching interests include British literature and culture from 1660 to 1900, the history of the novel, law and literature, gender studies, and Anglo-American literary and cultural relations. At Yale, she taught courses on British and American literature in the English department and served as a consultant at the McDougal Graduate Teaching Center, where she led pedagogy workshops and planned events for the graduate community. Melissa happily continues to think about pedagogy in IHUM, where she teaches the interdisciplinary class "Freedom, Equality, Difference" in the fall and the two-quarter English sequence, "A Life of Contemplation or Action? Debates in Western Literature and Philosophy," in the winter and spring.
Outside the classroom, Melissa has been involved in a variety of musical groups as vocalist and piano accompanist. Most recently, she sang with The Citations, a graduate student a cappella group at Yale.