Notes on Contributors
Madeline Bedecarré is Visiting Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College. Previously an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Francophone Studies, she has also taught at Bates College. She holds an MA from Columbia University in French and a PhD in Literature from the Ãcole des hautes études en sciences sociales. She specializes in Francophone African literature and the sociology of literature. Her book project, Prized Possessions: Institutional Francophonie & the Recognition of Francophone African Writers, explores the role the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie and its predecessors play in shaping the production and reception of African literature through literary prizes.
Thirthankar Chakraborty is Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi, India. He wrote his PhD on âSamuel Beckett and Indian Literatureâ, sponsored by a University of Kent 50th Anniversary Scholarship and later co-edited the volume on Samuel Beckett as World Literature (2020). During his PhD, he won the BCLT bursary for participating in the Institute of World Literature and was recipient of the TCD Samuel Beckett Summer Schoolâs international bursary. Besides Samuel Beckett, he is currently working on a project regarding the literatures of the Himalayan region while exploring authors from South Asia in the context of the latest debates in world literature studies.
David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and Director of Harvardâs Institute for World Literature. His books include Around the World in 80 Books (2021), Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), What Is World Literature? (2003), and an edition and translation of Georges Ngal, Giambatista Viko; or, The Rape of African Discourse (2022). He was the general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004, 2008), and he is one of the editors-in-chief of the Journal of World Literature. He is working on a book under the title of Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and Cultural Memory.
Claire Ducournau is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the University Paul-Valéry â Montpellier 3, and a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France. She specializes in the sociology of culture, francophone African writing, publishing and media, gender, post- and decolonial studies. She holds a PhD from the Ãcole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) â Paris on the mechanisms of production of the African literary canon that came out in a revised book form as La Fabrique des classiques africains (CNRS éditions, 2017). Her essays have appeared in journals including Yale French Studies, Journal of World Literature, Research in African Literatures, Compar(a)ison. An International Journal of Comparative Literature, Cahiers dâétudes africaines, Biens Symboliques/Symbolic Goods and Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales.
Laurent Jeanpierre is a sociologist and professor in the Political Science Department at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Part of his work focuses on the sociology of culture and intellectuals.
Michiel Leezenberg teaches in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Classics at the University of Amsterdam. He was a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) in Leiden and at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. He held visiting positions at INALCO (Paris), Jagiellonian University (Cracow), and the University of Ghent. His books include History and Philosophy of the Humanities (with Gerard de Vries, 2018) and Sex and Politics in Islam (in Dutch, 2017). Together with Anne-Marie Korte and Martin van Bruinessen, he co-edited the collection Gestures: The Study of Religion as Practice (2022).
Tristan Leperlier is a tenured researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and Fellow of the Marie SkÅodowska-Curie Actions and visiting scholar at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Leperlier is a sociologist of literature who works on postcolonialism, transnationalism, and plurilingualism, with a focus on North African literature. He is the author of Algérie, Les écrivains dans la décennie noire (Algeria: Writers during the Black Decade: Paris, CNRS, 2018). He is currently working on a book about the importation of North African literature in the USA.
Magdalena RÄduÈÄ is a tenured Associate Professor in the Literary Studies Department at the University of Bucharest. She holds a DEA in Sociology (Ãcole des hautes études en sciences sociales/ EHESS, Paris, 2003) and a PhD from the University of Bucharest (2009), with a thesis on Romanian literary press in the inter-war period. RÄduÈÄ publishes in Romanian, French and English. Her publications include Ãn context. O lecturÄ sociologizantÄ a literaturii române în ultimul deceniu comunist (In Context: A Sociological Reading of Romanian Literature in the Last Communist Decade, 2019), âBlue Jeans, Red Country: Young Writers in Romania in the 1980sâ (Journal of World Literature, 3, 1, 2018), âSavoir-faire. Sonorités et métier poétique dans le trajet postural de Mircea CÄrtÄrescuâ (Dacoromania Litteraria, 8, 1, 2021).
Tiphaine Samoyault is Director of Studies in comparative literature at the Ãcole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris. She is the author of Roland Barthes, a Biography (Seuil, 2015, Polity Press, 2017), Traduction et violence (Seuil, 2020) and of many narratives and essays. She is a permanent collaborator of many journals and newspapers, including Le Monde and the online literary journal En attendant Nadeau. She is also a translator and a literary critic.
Gisèle Sapiro is Professor of Sociology at the Ãcole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and Research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), member of Academia Europeae, silver Medal of the CNRS 2021. She is the author of La Guerre des écrivains, 1940â1953 (1999; Transl. French Writersâ War, 2014), La Responsabilité de lâécrivain (2011), La Sociologie de la littérature (2014; forth. Stanford UP), Les Ecrivains et la politique en France (2018), Peut-on dissocier lâÅuvre de lâauteur? (2020), Des mots qui tuent (2020). She has (co)edited: Translatio (2008), Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale (2009), LâEspace intellectuel en Europe (2009), Traduire la littérature et les sciences humaines (2012), Ideas on the move in the Social Sciences and Humanities (2020), and Dictionnaire international Bourdieu (2020).
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published on literary historiography, modernist literature, world literature, digital humanities, and posthumanism. He is the author of Mapping World Literature (2008), The New Human in Literature (2013), a co-author with Stefan Helgesson of Literature and the World (2019), and the editor of fourteen books, including World Literature: A Reader (2012), Danish Literature as World Literature (2017), Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism (2020). He is a co-editor of Orbis Litterarum and a member of the editorial board of Journal of World Literature. Thomsen is a member of the Academia Europaea (2010â).
Jing Tsu is John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures & Comparative Literature, and a member of the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale. Her most recent book is Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Riverhead, Penguin Random House, 2022).
Delia Ungureanu is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Bucharest and Associate Director of Harvardâs Institute for World Literature. She is the author of Time Regained: World Literature and Cinema (2021), From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature (2017), and Poetica Apocalipsei: RÄzboiul cultural în revistele literare româneÈti (1944â1947) (The Poetics of Apocalypse: The cultural war in Romanian literary magazines, 1944â1947, 2012). She has published essays on canon formation, modern poetry and poetics, Shakespeare, and Nabokov, and has co-edited special issues of the Journal of World Literature on âRomanian Literature in Todayâs Worldâ (with Thomas Pavel, 2018), on the legacy of Pascale Casanova (with Gisèle Sapiro, 2020), and on world literature and world cinema (with Michael Wood, 2021).