Mathieu Duplay is Professor of American Literature at Denis Diderot University (Paris 7). A former Philosophy student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, he wrote his PhD on Malcolm Lowry (1996). His current research mainly focuses on the relations between literature, drama, and music in the United States and anglophone Canada. He is writing a book on American composer John Adams’s works for the stage (operas, oratorios, musicals), in an interdisciplinary perspective at the crossroads between literary criticism, Drama Studies, and musicology. He also studies the role of music and opera in North American poetry and fiction (Malcolm Lowry, Willa Cather, Alice Munro, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams). This investigation is underwritten by a reflection on the topic of the frontiers of literature, a problem whose emergence can be in part traced back to the Transcendentalist philosophers, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson. His published works include William Gaddis, Carpenter's Gothic : Le scandale de l'écriture (2001) and a volume edited with Anne Boissière, Vie, Symbole, Mouvement : Susanne K. Langer et la danse (2013).
Hélène Quanquin is Professor of American Civilization at the University of Lille, after being an Associate Professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris 3). She defended in 2001 a PhD dissertation on the abortion debate in the United States and Canada since the 1960s. Her current research comprises two main fields: the feminist movement in anglophone North America in the 19th and 20th centuries, and a comparative study of the United States and Canada. In 2005, she was allocated a research grant at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard University). She has directed, with Christine Lorre-Johnson and Sandrine Ferré-Rode, Comment comparer le Canada avec les Etats-Unis aujourd'hui ? (2009) and, with Didier Aubert, Refaire l'Amérique : Imaginaire et histoire des Etats-Unis (2011).
Camille Rouquet passed the Agrégation in English, and has a PhD in Anglophone Languages and Cultures. Her 2017 dissertation, directed by Pr. François Brunet, was entitled The Icons of Vietnam and Their Power: The Systems of Consecration of Photojournalistic Images and the Rhetoric of Media Influence Since the Vietnam War. She studies the construction of social memory relying on iconic images and currently works on a study of contemporary uses of ephemeral images. For three years, she has co-organized Camera Memoria, a LARCA research seminar that welcomes French and international scholars studying all forms of memory in American photography. She is currently working as a PRAG at Paris Sciences et Lettres University.
