Speakers

Corinne Bigot is Senior Lecturer at the University Paris Ouest Nanterre. She received her PhD from the Université Paris X in Canadian Literature with a dissertation on silence in Alice Munro’s short stories. Her areas of specialization include Canadian Literature, gender studies, narrative studies, and the representation of landscape. Her publications to date have focused on the Canadian writer Alice Munro with particular emphasis on the use of typography in representing trauma and haunting memories, and reticence as a narrative strategy. She recently published essays on gender and colonial space and nineteenth-century Canadian women writers. She is currently working on several projects on Munro’s most recent collections, and has just published a monograph on Alice Munro’s stories with Presses Universitaires de Rennes, entitled Alice Munro les silences de la nouvelle. 

Laura Dawkins is currently Professor of English at Murray State University in Murray, KY. She has published numerous articles on women’s literature and American literature in journals such as LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory; South Atlantic Review; Callaloo; and Short Story. In addition, she has published chapters in edited collections such as The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, Eds. Caroline F. Levander and Carol J. Singley (Rutgers University Press, 2003) and Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination, Eds. Harriet Pollack and Christopher Metress (Louisiana State University Press, 2008). She received her doctorate from Indiana University in 1999 under the direction of Professor Susan Gubar.

Cécile Fouache is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Rouen (France). A member of the Interdisciplinary Research Team on Cultural Areas (ERIAC), she is the head of the Multiplidisciplinary Institute of Canadian Studies at the University of Rouen, for which she has organized several international conferences, notably on “Canada’s Peoples”, “Northern Identities” and “Le Même et l’Autre”. Her PhD thesis, which was supervised by professor Jacques Leclaire and defended in 2006, deals with “The Art of the Everyday in Carol Shields’s novels”. She has published papers on authors such as David Malouf, Mudrooroo, Alexis Wright (Australia), Carol Shields, Tomson Highway, and Grey Owl (Canada). Her current field of research is concerned with contemporary Canadian literature in English, with identity and Aboriginal issues in the contemporary literatures and multicultural societies of postcolonial countries (more specifically Australia and Canada).

Sabrina Francesconi is Adjunct Professor of English linguistics at the University of Trento in Italy and has extensively worked on Alice Munro’s short stories over the last fifteen years, starting from her MA and Ph.D. dissertations. She participated in the conferences Telling Secrets: the Art of Alice Munro (University of Orléans, 2003) and Alice Munro: the Art of the Short Story (Siena-Toronto Centre, 2007) and published essays on Munro in literary journals, among which Open Letter. A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (2004), Textus (2009) and The Journal of the Short Story in English (2010).

Vanessa Guignery is Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the author of several books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, including The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Macmillan, 2006), as well as a monograph entitled Seeing and Being: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (PUF, 2012). She has published articles on various British and postcolonial contemporary authors, as well as a monograph on B.S. Johnson, This is not Fiction (Sorbonne UP, 2009). She edited and co-edited several collections of essays on contemporary British and post-colonial literature including (Re)mapping London (Publibook, 2008), Voices and Silence (CSP, 2009), Chasing Butterflies: Janet Frame’s The Lagoon and Other Stories (Publibook, 2011), Hybridity: Forms and Figures in Literature and the Visual Arts (CSP, 2011) and The Famished Road: Ben Okri's Imaginary Homelands (CSP, 2013). Her collection of interviews with eight contemporary writers, Novelists in the New Millenium, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. Website: www.vanessaguignery.com

Jacob Hovind received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Emory University in 2011, and has then taught at Towson University, where he currently serves as Assistant Professor of English. His articles and reviews, covering figures as diverse as Erich Auerbach, Samuel Beckett, and Jacques Derrida, have appeared in Comparative Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and The French Review. His first book, Becoming Literary, explores the rhetoric and ontology of literary character within the language of modernism. It is forthcoming from the University Press of Florida. He is currently beginning research into a second book, which will explore the legacies of modernist epiphany on latter twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction. He has presented a number of papers at international conferences on a variety of figures, including a paper on Alice Munro’s short story-novel hybrids at last February’s “Characters Migrate” conference at the Université de Caen Basse-Normandie.

Katherine Hrisonopulo, PhD in English linguistics, works at the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics at Saint-Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts. The field of her research includes the following aspects of English linguistics: the semiotic characteristics of function words, variability of function words and constructions with them in a literary text, the nature of construal operations in grammar and their stylistic effects, cognitive and discourse factors for alternations in the sphere of English function words and correlative structural units. Results of this research are reflected in articles published in English and in Russian. 

Catherine Lanone is Professor of English Literature at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3). She has published about the Modernist period, including a book on E.M. Forster and another one on Emily Brontë, as well as articles on Forster, Virginia Woolf, the Brontës and Graham Greene; she has also published papers on Victorian literature and on Jane Urquhart.

Christine Lorre-Johnston is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 and a member of THALIM (UMR 7172). Her research is in postcolonial literature (Canadian, New Zealand and Australian especially) and theory, sometimes from a comparative perspective, and with a special interest in the genre of the short story, writers of the Chinese diaspora, and the discourse of globalisation. Her publications include a co-edited book (Comment comparer le Canada avec les États-Unis? Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009), the guest (co-) edition of three issues of Commonwealth Essays and Studies (Aut. 2008, Spr. 2011, Aut. 2011), journal articles in Revue française d’études américaines, and several articles and chapters on the short stories of Janet Frame and Alice Munro. She is currently co-editing (with Eleonora Rao, University of Salerno) a book of essays on place and space in Alice Munro’s short fiction, and working towards a critical book on the same author, focusing on affect. In April 2014 she spent several days at the University of Calgary, where the Alice Munro fonds is kept in the Special Collections of the Taylor Family Digital Library (http://www.ucalgary.ca/utoday/issue/2014-04-28/nobel-prize-win-spurs-international-interest-alice-munro-archives).

Claude Maisonnat is Emeritus Professor at University Lumière Lyon-2 (France), where he taught contemporary literature. A Conrad scholar, he has published more than 30 articles on his works and a book on Lord Jim. Also a specialist of the short story, he has written on contemporary writers, including Bernard McLaverty, Edna O’Brien, Hemingway, Alice Munro, Antonia Byatt, Angela Carter, Dylan Thomas, Malcom Lowry, R. Carver, P. Auster, V.S. Naipaul, Olive Senior, etc. With Patrick Badonnel he has written a book on the psychoanalytical approach of the short story, and co-edited a volume on textual reprising.

Jennifer Murray is Associate Professor of North American literature at the University of Franche-Comté. The focus of her research is a Lacanian approach to subjectivity in twentieth century writing by Canadian and American women. Recent publications include articles on Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro and Harper Lee. She is currently editing a special volume of Lacanian readings of literature, theatre and cinema for the online journal E-rea (to appear in December 2014) and is working towards the completion of a book of Lacanian readings of selected stories by Alice Munro.

Claire Omhovère is Professor of English and Commonwealth Literature at University Paul Valéry in Montpellier (France) where she is affiliated to the research group EMMA (Etudes Montpellieraines du Monde Anglophone). She is the current editor of Commonwealth Essays & Studies and the president of the SEPC (Société d’Etude des Pays du Commonwealth). She has published articles in European and Canadian journals, and contributed book chapters on the novels of Robert Kroetsch, Rudy Wiebe, Jane Urquhart and Miriam Toews. She is the author of Sensing Space: The Poetics of Geography in Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Peter Lang, 2007) and the editor of a volume of translations, L’Art du paysage: essais du monde anglophone (Michel Houdiard, forthcoming).

Oriana Palusci is Full professor of English at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’, where she teaches Linguistics, Canadian literature and culture, Translation Studies. She has intensively published in different fields, especially on women writers (C. Brontë, V. Woolf, D. Lessing) gender, translation, tourism, science fiction, travel writing and postcolonial studies. She has published on Canadian literature, linguistics and culture (on M. Laurence, M. Atwood, J. Urquhart, M. Engel, A. Munro, A. Michaels). In 1994 she edited the Italian version of Munro’s first collection of stories La danza delle ombre felici. She has recently edited (with B. Rizzardi in 2014) the collection of essays Crossing Borders: Variations on a Theme in Canadian Studies. She is the President of the Italian Association of Canadian Studies.

Ulrica Skagert works as an educational developer at Kristianstad University with a special responsibility of coordinating the development of academic writing in English at the university. She holds a PhD in English from Stockholm University. Her dissertation, Possibility-Space and Its Imaginative Variations in Alice Munro’s Short Stories, examines fiction as the possibility of the real in Munro’s writing. She has published two articles and is frequently engaged to give public lectures on Munro’s fiction. Her research interests include academic writing, short fiction and the teaching of writing.

Pascale Tollance is Professor of English at Université Lumière–Lyon 2. She has written extensively on British / Canadian author Malcolm Lowry, as well as on British contemporary authors such as Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson and Rachel Seiffert. She is the author of a book on Graham Swift (Graham Swift. La Scène de la voix. Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2011) which focuses on the staging of voice and gaze in Swift’s fiction. She is on the editorial board of L’Atelier, has co-edited vol. 5.1 (Survivance) and is currently working on vol. 6.2. (La Transmission). Her interests include post-colonial literatures (she has worked recently on the fiction of Janet Frame and J.M. Coetzee).

Tom Ue is Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow and Canadian Centennial Scholar in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London, where he researches Shakespeare’s influence on the writing of Henry James, George Gissing, and Oscar Wilde. Ue has taught at University College London and University College London Academy. He was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at Yale University, and the 2011 Cameron Hollyer Memorial Lecturer, and he has held an Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship. He is editor of World Film Locations: Toronto (Intellect Books, 2014), which coincides with the city’s 180th anniversary, and Dictionary of Literary Biography 377: Twenty-First Century British Novelists (Gale, 2015).

Héliane Ventura is Professor of Contemporary Literature in English at the University Toulouse 2-Le Mirail, and one of France’s leading scholars in Canadian studies in general and Munro’s fiction in particular. Her research is mainly centered on the short story written by women in the contemporary English-speaking world, exploring the rewriting of the canon, the resurgence of images and the emergence of transatlantic literatures. She has recently devoted her research to Aboriginal writing and written articles on Pauline Johnson, Eden Robinson and Tomson Highway. Since 2010, she has edited several volumes, mainly focusing on Alice Munro and Jane Urquhart.

Jean-Marc Victor, a former student of the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, is Senior Lecturer at the University of Paris Sorbonne where he teaches literature, translation and image analysis. He has published various articles on the literature of the South of the United States (Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor) as well as on American photography (Ralph Eugene Meatyard). He is currently working on a critical study of The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty.

Kerry-Jane Wallart is Senior Lecturer at the University of Paris Sorbonne. After first focusing on contemporary Caribbean theatre she has published articles on such African playwrights as Athol Fugard and Wole Soyinka. Her research concerns itself more generally with the migration and mutation of genre in post-colonial literatures.