Geoff Baker is currently Associate Professor of Literature in the Division of Humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He previously taught British and Comparative Literature for nine years in the Department of English at the California State University, Chico. Prior to joining the English Department at Chico in 2006, he studied at Brigham Young University, Universität Bremen, the Freie Universität in Berlin, and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. Geoff’s scholarly and teaching interests include the novel, literary realism, theories of imperialism, and the relationship between politics and literature.

Geoff has published two books, The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion: Literature and Engagement since Nietzsche and the Naturalists (Palgrave, 2017) and Realism’s Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Ohio State UP, 2009), and co-edited another one, with Eva Aldea, called Realism’s Others (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). In addition, he has authored articles on a number of different writers, including Wilkie Collins and Anthony Trollope, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, J.M. Coetzee, Honoré de Balzac, William Shakespeare, Marguerite Duras, Friedrich Nietzsche and Antonin Artaud, and French hip-hop artist MC Solaar.

At present, he is working on a third book-length project related to realism. Tentatively titled The Critique of Judgment: Evidence and Belief in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, it examines the relationship between empirical and non-empirical theories of knowledge in legal discourse and detective and legal plots in the nineteenth-century novel in Britain.

At Yale-NUS, Geoff teaches courses in the Common Curriculum and elective courses for the Literature major on nineteenth- and twentieth-century topics.