Vanessa Guignery

Vanessa Guignery (www.vanessaguignery.com) is Professor of Contemporary English Literature and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon (France), after having taught at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris as Assistant and Associate Professor from 1996 to 2009. She was Visiting Professor at the University of Texas in Austin in 2011. She has been a Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas in Austin in 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2016, as well as a University Affiliate and Scholar since 2010 for periods of one up to six months. She is an honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France.

Vanessa Guignery is the author of several books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, including The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Macmillan, 2006), Julian Barnes from the Margins (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Conversations with Julian Barnes (Mississippi Press, 2009), co-edited with Ryan Roberts, the webmaster of julianbarnes.com. She has published articles on Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts, Alain de Botton, David Lodge, Jonathan Coe, Janet Frame, Ben Okri, Caryl Phillips, Zadie Smith and Alice Munro, as well as several essays and a monograph on B.S. Johnson, This is not Fiction (Sorbonne UP, 2009). She translated Jonathan Coe’s biography of B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, into French (Quidam, 2010) and edited the correspondence between B.S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). She is the author of Seeing and Being: Ben Okri's The Famished Road (PUF, 2012) and of a monograph on Jonathan Coe for Palgrave Macmillan (2015). She is the editor and co-editor of about fifteen books on contemporary literature in English and regularly conducts interviews with writers. From 2000 to 2009, she co-directed the research center ERCLA ("Writings of the Contemporary Novel in English") at the University of La Sorbonne. She is now a member of the CNRS research unit IRHIM.
Address: Austin, Texas, United States