Sharon Marcus is an Associate Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Professor Marcus specializes in nineteenth-century British and French novels, urban and architectural studies, and feminist and queer theory. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Johns Hopkins University in 1995. In addition to Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999), her recent work includes an article on Victorian fashion plates and a book on female homoeroticism and the Victorian family: Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. (Princeton 2007).