books / authors on tour
The French Embassy offers financial aid to American institutions universities, libraries, bookstores, publishing houses, and other venues across the United States wishing to host French authors for readings, signings, and symposia. The authors listed below are currently available for booking. Priority will be given to institutions which submit a detailed project for an American audience, especially events with wide visibility such as bookfairs and multidisciplinary festivals. Preference will also be given to panels involving International or American writers or events organized in conjunction with an exhibition or other special program. If you would like to invite one of these authors to your institution, please read the application procedures.
Beatriz Preciado / Walls & Bridges
Beatriz Preciado has become one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and sexuality. A professor of Political History of the Body, Gender Theory, and History of Performance at Paris VIII, she is also the author of Manifiesto contrasexual, which has become a queer theory classic, and Pornotopía: Architecture and Sexuality in Playboy During the Cold War, which has was a finalist for the 2010 Anagrama Essay Prize. She received her PhD in the Theory of Architecture at Princeton and her Masters in Contemporary Philosophy and Gender Theory at the New School for Social Research in New York. READ MORE
Pascal Dibie / Walls & Bridges
Pascal Dibie is a professor of ethnology at the University of Paris Diderot-Paris 7, where he is co-director of the division of sciences of the city. He is the author of a two-part ethnology of a village in Burgundy that has become a classic in the discipline: Le Village retrouvé, ethnologie de l’intérieur (Grasset, 1979) and thirty years later, Le village métamorphosé, révolution dans la France profonde (Plon, 2006). He is also the author of Ethnologie de la chambre à coucher, which has been translated into fifteen languages and has sold 30,000 copies. READ MORE
Michèle Audin / Walls & Bridges
Michèle Audin is a French mathematician, and a professor at the Institut de recherche mathématique avancée (IRMA) in Strasbourg (France), where she does research notably in the area of symplectic geometry. Born in 1954, she is a former student of l’École normale supérieure de jeunes filles within the École normale supérieure de Sèvres. Audin became a member of the OuLiPo in 2009. READ MORE
Peter Szendy / Walls & Bridges
Peter Szendy (born 1966 in Paris) is a French philosopher and musicologist. He teaches at the Université de Paris X Nanterre and is a consultant to IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique), an organization that has been a pioneer in electroacoustic innovation and a mecca for contemporary music. READ MORE
Frédéric Boyer / Walls and Bridges
Frédéric Boyer is the author of more than 30 books. For years, his works have oscillated between personal writings and the reinterpretation and translation of major ancient texts. He’s notably undertaken, with a number of contemporary writers (Olivier Cadiot, Jean Echenoz, Florence Delay, Jacques Roubaud, Marie Ndiaye, Valère Novarina among others), a new translation of the bible, which was published by Bayard in 2001. READ MORE
Vinciane Despret / Walls & Bridges
Vinciane Despret was born in Anderlecht, Belgium and grew up near Liège, where she still lives today. Initially a philosophy student, she quickly went back to school to study psychology. Shortly thereafter she discovered ethology, the study of animal behavior, and gained a passion for the humans who work with animals. Her career vacillated between human psychology and ethology and, wanting to combine them, she became interested in what she calls “the political consequences of our theoretical choices.” She then began studying both “how to live” with animals and the issues raised by human psychotherapeutic practices. READ MORE
Camille de Toledo / Walls & Bridges
Camille de Toledo was born in 1976. He studied history in London, photography and cinema in New York, and now lives in Paris. He is also a filmmaker, screenwriter, and novelist. De Toledo is affiliated with the European Society of Authors (a literary, intellectual and digital think tank dedicated to promoting translation through a network of projects) and is involved with the TLHUB project. READ MORE
Corine Pelluchon / Walls & Bridges
Corine Pelluchon is an associate professor at the CERSES, a research center on meaning, ethics, and society affiliated with the CNRS (The National Center for Scientific Research) and the University of Paris Descartes. A specialist in the works of Léo Strauss and in moral and political philosophy, she has devoted much of her research and teaching to issues of applied ethics such as medical and biomedical ethics, animal ethics, and environmental ethics. READ MORE
Ivan Jablonka / Walls & Bridges
Ivan Jablonka is a French historian and former student of Alain Corbin and Jean-Noël Luc. In 2004, he defended his doctoral thesis on Wards of the State Under the Third Republic. Now an Associate Professor of contemporary history at the Université du Maine in Le Mans (France), he is one of the editors-in-chief of La Vie des idées/Books and Ideas and editorial director with Pierre Rosanvallon of the collection La République des Idées for the French Publisher Le Seuil. READ MORE
Romain Bertrand / Walls & Bridges
Romain Bertrand has been a research director at the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques since 2008. A graduate of the Institute of Political Studies of Bordeaux, he earned his doctorate at Sciences Po Paris and joined the CERI (a social science research center dedicated to international studies) in 2001. He has been an editorial-committee member of Critique internationale and Raisons politiques, and is currently a member Annales editorial-committee as well as a member of the peer-review committees of Politix and Moussons READ MOREauthors on tour
