Anne-Lise François, an Assistant Professor in English, has received a Townsend Fellowship for Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Professor François’s book will identify what she calls an “ethics of reserve or affirmative reticence” in a series of texts in which “nothing happens”: Mme de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Cleves (1678), Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902), and poems of uncounted experience by Wordsworth, Dickinson, and Hardy. While these works appear to imply a feminine ethics of chastity, modesty, and renunciation, Professor François argues they are linked across historical periods and generic boundaries by an ethos of attending to unobserved, uncountable experience rather than conclusive empirical evidence, an ethos developed within both Romantic lyricism and the novel of feminine education. Professor François received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton in 1999 and joined the Comparative Literature and English Departments at Berkeley in the same year.