Andrew Watts is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the representation of provincial life in 'La Comédie humaine' and, more recently, on the adaptation of nineteenth-century French novels in different artistic media. He is the author of Preserving the Provinces: Small Town and Countryside in the Work of Honoré de Balzac (2007) and the co-author (with Kate Griffiths) of Adapting Nineteenth-Century France: Literature in Film, Theatre, Television, Radio and Print (2013). He has also co-edited (with Michelle Cheyne) a critical edition of Balzac's Le Nègre (2014).