SPEAKERS

Professor Nathalie Ferrand is a research director at the CNRS and, since 2024, has headed the Institute for Modern Texts and Manuscripts (ITEM, Paris), the research center where genetic criticism was invented in the late 1960s. She is particularly responsible for the “Écritures des Lumières” team.

A specialist in 18th-century literature, she teaches at the École normale supérieure in Paris (ENS/PSL). She is the author of numerous books and articles (www.nferrand.info) on the novel, literary illustration, marginalia, and the application of genetic criticism to texts from the Ancien Régime. She contributed to the Oxford edition of Voltaire's Complete Works and published two books in the Oxford University Studies on the Enlightenment series in 2009 and 2011. Her recent publications include: Écrire en Europe de Leibniz à Foscolo (ed. Paris, CNRS-Éditions, 2019), an edition of Rousseau's short stories entitled Trois contes (Rivages, 2021) and, in 2022, a monograph Dans l’atelier de J.-J. Rousseau (Hermann, 2022), in a collection she created for Hermann publishers (https://www.item.ens.fr/atelier/). She is currently preparing an edition of selected letters by Rousseau for Gallimard, as well as a book paying tribute to the founder of genetic criticism: Ma génétique. Pour Louis Hay à l'occasion de son centenaire (co-edited with P. Musitelli, Paris, Garnier Classiques, 2026).

Antonio Lavieri is Full Professor of French Linguistics and Translation Theory at the University of Palermo (Italy), where he directs the Janus Centre for Translation and Cultural Practices. Founder and President of the Italian Society for Translation Studies (SIT), he has been Visiting and Honorary Fellow at University of Oxford (Magdalen College) and is a member of the équipe “Multilinguisme, Traduction, Création” at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ENS/ITEM-CNRS, Paris). His research situates translation processes at the intersection of linguistic anthropology, comparative literature, and epistemology, with a focus on their role in shaping regimes of knowledge and cultural authority. He has published extensively in international venues, including the entry “Anthropology and Translation” in the Handbook of Translation Studies (John Benjamins, 2021). His recent monographs include I sogni di Babele. Studi sull’immaginario del tradurre and Cancel culture e traduzione. Dai conflitti linguistici all’oblio digitale (2026).

Geert Lernout is professor emeritus at the University of Antwerp where he founded a James Joyce Center that developed into the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (dir. Dirk Van Hulle). In English he published several books and many articles on Joyce; and in Dutch on the history of the book, on Bach’s Goldberg Variations, on the Bible, and on American religion. He translated Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and Joyce’s Exiles into Dutch, and with Vincent Deane and Daniel Ferrer, he edited twelve Finnegans Wake notebooks. In 2007 he was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea. With Valérie Bénéjam, he is general editor of the European Joyce Studies book series; and he is on the editorial board of James Joyce Quarterly and Joyce Studies Annual. 

Paulius V. Subačius graduated in Lithuanian philology and is currently a professor of the theory of literature and a member of the Doctoral Committee of Philology at Vilnius University. Member of the Board of the Research Council of Lithuania and a full member of the Lithuanian Catholic Academy of Science. Author/editor of seventeen books in the fields of literature, history, textual scholarship, religion, and academic politics. Among them are the first “Guide on Textual Scholarship” in Lithuanian and several critical editions, both printed and digital, of diaries, letters, sermons, and poetry by Lithuanian authors. He published several articles in English in “Variants”, “Editio”, “Textual Cultures”, “Ecdotica”, “Politeja” and “Filologia XXI”. For the past few years, he has been implementing the research project “The Text as a Hedgerow”, during which the genetic criticism approach was used to examine the manuscripts of 20th-century writers, and new concepts of text theory linking philology and the biosciences were proposed.