After growing up in Portland, Oregon and Austin, Texas, Ben lived in Paris for two years while teaching English at elementary schools in a suburb to the East of Paris before coming to Philadelphia in 2008 to join Penn’s PhD program in French. In 2012 he was enrolled as a joint-degree doctoral candidate at Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), where he had previously earned a master’s degree in French literature. His dissertation, entitled “Uncertain Boundaries: Dispositive Techniques in Prévost’s Novels,” examines the interaction between narrative structure and dispositive structure (division into books, volumes, installments, etc.) in the novels of Antoine François Prévost.