Speakers' bios

Biobibliographies of the conference speakers

Éric ATHENOT is currently professor of American Literature at Université Paris-Est Créteil. After writing his PhD dissertation on Robert Lowell, he has been working extensively on the poetry of Walt Whitman. In 2002, he published a short introductory book (Walt Whitman; poète cosmos), and, since 2008, has been translating Whitman's prose and poetry for Éditions José Corti. He has so far translated the first editions of Leaves of Grass, Drum Beats, Children of Adam and Calamus, as well as the entire prose volume of Collect (including "Democratic Vistas"). In 2015 he organised a conference devoted both to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Regarding contemporary American fiction, he organised the first ever conference devoted to the work of Richard Powers in 2004 at Université François-Rabelais, and has published on Mary Caponegro, Richard Lutz, and Rikki Ducornet. 

Sylvie BAUER is Professor of US literature at Université Rennes 2 (France) where she is a member of the ACE (Anglophonie : Communautés, Ecritures) research team. Her work focuses more particularly on contemporary US literature, on the immoral universe of language, on the relation between art and technology and on contemporary issues related to biotechnologies. The author of a book on the work of Walter Abish, she has also written a number of papers on the novels of Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, Richard Powers or Ben Marcus, to name but a few. She has co-edited a dozen of books, the latest two being Brian Evenson, l’Empire de la cruauté (PUR), with Florian Tréguer and Nawelle Lechevalier-Bekadar and Mutations 3 : Posthumain et écrans, (Otrante n 51), with Hélène Machinal and Lucie Bernard.

James BAXTER

Maud BOUGEROL is Associate Professor of 20th and 21st century North-American Literature at Aix-Marseille Université. In 2018, she defended her dissertation entitled “Aesthetics of reticence in Brian Evenson’s work.” Her research focuses on ultra-contemporary experimental fiction and more specifically on the aesthetics of the reception of these works. She has given papers at international conferences in Europe and in the United States, and published articles in journals and joint publications on Brian Evenson’s shorts stories and novels, as well as on the innovative work of various North-American authors such as Ben Marcus, Laird Hunt, Babak Lakghomi, and Blake Butler among others.

Tom BYERS is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Louisville, where he taught and wrote about US literature, film, and popular culture. He has published widely in these areas not only in the USA, but in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Brazil, and other countries. He has had Fulbrights to Denmark and Ukraine, and he had the privilege, thanks to Anne-Laure Tissut, of teaching for a term at Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV. For twelve years he served as Director of the US Department of State Study of the US Institute on Contemporary Literature—a project that will almost certainly be eliminated by the current US regime, if it has not already been.

Julian CARADEC is a Ph.D candidate at Aix-Marseille Université. His work focuses on the death of children through the prism of economics, critical theory and anthropology in contemporary American literature.

Marc CHENETIER is Professor emeritus of American literature at Université Paris-Cité. He is a Senior Member of the Institute Universitaire de France and was President of the European Association for American Studies from 2004 to 2008. A specialist of contemporary American fiction, he taught in France, in the UK and in the US (Stanford, Berkeley, University of Virginia, Princeton…) and published a dozen works such as:

Au-delà du Soupçon : la nouvelle fiction américaine de 1960 à nos jours, Le Seuil, 1989

La perte de l'Amérique : archéologie d'un amour, Belin, 2000

Steven Millhauser : la précision de l'impossible, Belin, 2003

He also translated more than 80 works of American literature (Willa Cather, Richard Brautigan, Russell Banks, Vachel Lindsay, Denis Johnson, F.S. Fitzgerald, Jack London…).

Brigitte FELIX is Professor of contemporary American literature at the Université Paris 8. She is the author of a monograph and several articles on William Gaddis, and contributed to the critical edition of the first two volumes of Philip Roth’s novels in French for Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2017 and 2022). Her research focuses on late 20th and 21st c. experimental American fiction and on the poetics of innovative forms in contemporary writing, including multimodal narratives (Mark Z. Danielewski, Lance Olsen, Shelley Jackson, Steve Tomasula…). She is a member of LILAC, a collective research group of French and international scholars dedicated to the study of contemporary innovative fiction from the United States.

Nawelle LECHEVLAIER-BEKADAR is an Associate Professor of American Literature at Bretagne Sud University. She has published two monographs on Brian Evenson's works: Brian Evenson : L'Empire de la cruauté co-edited with Sylvie Bauer and Florian Tréguer (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2021), the proceedings of a conference about the author organized at Rennes 2 University in 2015, and Brian Evenson, une esthétique du malaise (Sorbonne Université Presses, Americana, 2024). Her research focuses on contemporary American fiction and explores the representation of violence and malaise in literature.

Béatrice PIRE is Associate Professor of American Literature at University of Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. She is the author of Hart Crane l’Ame extravagante (Belin 2003), Figures de la décomposition familiale dans le roman américain contemporain (Houdiard 2018), David Foster Wallace: Presences of the Other (ed. with P. L. Patoine, Sussex Academic Press, 2017), Contemporary American Fiction in the Embrace of the Digital Age (ed. with P.L. Patoine and Arnaud Regnauld, Sussex Academic Press, 2021) and Postmodern Couples (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025). She has published numerous articles, book chapters and book reviews on contemporary American fiction.

Françoise SAMMARCELLI is Professor emeritus of American literature at the School of the Arts of Sorbonne University where she created the Research Group on Text and Image. A former editor of the French journal of American Studies (RFEA), she is the author of a book on John Barth (John Barth, les bonheurs d’un acrobate, Belin, 1998) and she has published extensively on issues of representation, intertextuality and intersemiotics, including one essay on Brian Evenson’s Immobility. She has also edited several books and special journal issues including Picture and Memory (Presses de l’Université Paris Sorbonne 2009), Obscurity (Michel Houdiard 2009), Exposure/Overexposure (Sillages critiques 2014) and Visual Texts, Textual Pictures (Sillages critiques 2016), Tearing up the Page (Sillages critiques 2020).

Anne ULLMO is a professor at the University of Tours where she mainly teaches American literature. Her field of research is twofold, as she has never stopped working on turn-of-the-19th-20th-century fiction while also delving into the persistence of certain 19th century forms and paradigms in contemporary literature (Rikki Ducornet, Steven Millhauser, Lynne Tillman). Since 2007, she has devoted a series of articles to the fiction of Brian Evenson, focusing primarily on the intricate relationship between the body and writing. Her analyses thus probe themes of corporeality, fragmentation, mutilation and the materiality of language.

Stéphane VANDERHAEGHE