Peter Mann is the author of the novels THE TORQUED MAN (Harper, 2022) and WORLD PACIFIC (Harper, 2025). A longtime resident of San Francisco, he grew up in Kansas City, went to Wesleyan University, studied in Salamanca, Copenhagen, and Berlin, and earned a PhD in Modern European history before realizing that he wanted to be a novelist and a cartoonist. At Stanford Mann teaches the first-year Foundations sequence of the Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) program, a syllabus in literature, history, and art, with readings that span the ancient epic to the contemporary novel. Before coming to the MLA, he taught for several years in Stanford's residential freshman humanities program, Structured Liberal Education.