Chris Chan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the English section of the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. Prior to joining UGent, he received his B.A. (hons., summa cum laude) in English and chemistry from Rutgers University (in New Jersey, USA), and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English from the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth-century British literature and culture, poetry and poetics, and the history of literary criticism. Currently, he is revising his dissertation, Communal Lyricisms and the Lyricization of English Poetry, 1650–1790, into a book manuscript which will trace the social, political, and material conditions that fueled the "rise" of lyric poetry and interpretation across the long eighteenth century. He has also held a Benjamin Franklin Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and a predoctoral research fellowship at the UCLA-Clark Library, and his scholarship has been published in Eighteenth-Century Studies.