The Paul Auster Research Library Visitors 2023 and 2024
The Paul Auster Research Library visiting scholar 2023
In residence 2nd – 26th May 2023.
We are honoured to be able to host one of the most important scholars of Auster’s work, François Hugonnier is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Angers. He is the author of several pieces on Paul Auster’s poetry and fiction, including a monograph entitled Les interdits de la représentation. Paul Auster, Jerome Rothenberg (ed. Otrante, 2022). In collaboration with I. B. Siegumfeldt, co-edited a collection of essays with and about Paul Auster (New Avenues in Paul Auster’s Twentieth-Century Work, LISA e-journal, 2020). He has also published a book-length study of Don DeLillo’s 9/11 novel Falling Man (Paris-Nanterre U P, 2016).
While visiting The Paulk Auster Research Library, Hugonnier will be working on his project entitled, The cover art, translations and adaptations of Paul Auster’s writing. The Paul Auster Research Library in Copenhagen offers a wide range of manuscripts that make up a kaleidoscope of images and languages. The cover art, translations and adaptations of his books are a trove of representations that echo Auster’s (and his characters’) craft. If intertextuality, notebooks, pencils, typewriters, paintings and movies inhabit Auster’s tales, we should also study the paratextual material as a companion that enhances the scope of Auster’s writing and partakes in its reception outside the books. Therefore, this fellowship project aims to explore the transmedia and transnational achievements of various translators and artists who have contributed to the international outreach of Paul Auster’s original body of writing in poetry, autobiography and fiction.
The Paul Auster Research Library Erasmus visitor 2023
We are pleased to welcome one of the most interesting and renowned critics of Auster’s work, James Peacock, as our Erasmus Visiting Scholar from 19-25 February 2023. Peacock is a Reader of English and American Literature and Research Director for the School of Humanities, Keele University, UK. He will be working on his new book entitled, Gentrification in Contemporary Fiction: Domestic Space and the Neighbourhood in the Real Etate State (contracted to Bloomsbury for summer 2023). Peacock’s Understanding Paul Auster was published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2010. His 2015 monograph, Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age (Bloomsbury), contained an analysis of City of Glass, The Brooklyn Follies and Sunset Park. His articles and chapters on Auster include “Self-Dispersal and Self-Help: Paul Auster’s Second Person” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2020), “The Father in the Ice: Paul Auster, Character and Literary Ancestry,” also in Critique (2011), and “Unearthing Paul Auster’s Poetry” in Orbis Litterarum (2009).
The Paul Auster Research Library visiting fellow 2023
We are pleased to welcome Seth Murray as our first Visiting Fellow at The Paul Auster Research Library. Murray is currently completing his Ph.D. dissertation on representations of Venice in American literature at the University of Rochester, New York. He will join us for one month in October 2023 to work on a project that aims to situate Paul Auster’s recent biography of the late nineteenth-century American writer, Stephen Crane, as the culmination of a career not just as a novelist but also as a critic and theorizer of literature more broadly. He will attend to this understudied aspect of Auster’s career as a writer, which often seems parallel to his fiction (if it is considered at all), and hopefully demonstrate how Auster the critic and Auster the novelist work in conversation with one another. I bring together my expertise as a specialist in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American literature along with a long-running fascination with Auster’s corpus.
The Paul Auster Research Library Visiting Fellow 2024
We are honoured to be able to welcome one of the most important scholars of Auster’s work, Aliki Varvogli. Dr. Varvogli is Head of Humanities and Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Dundee in Scotland. She will be in residence from 2 to 28 April 2024.
She wrote her PhD thesis on Paul Auster’s fiction (University of East Anglia, 1998) and since then she has been publishing Auster’s work alongside her other research interests in urban spaces, immigration, and discourses of work in contemporary American fiction. Her publications include The World That is the Book: Paul Auster’s Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001); ‘Exploding Fictions’ in Harold Bloom, ed., Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Paul Auster (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004), pp. 191-206; ‘Ailing Authors: Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium and Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost’, Review of International American Studies, 3.3-4.1, Winter 2008/Spring 2009, 94-100; ‘“The Worst Possibilities of the Imagination are the Country You Live in”: Paul Auster in the Twenty-first Century’, in The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster, Stefania Ciocia and Jesus Gonzalez Lopez, eds, Cambridge Scholars Press 2011, pp39-54; ‘Money Talks: Language, Work and Authorship from The Music of Chance to Sunset Park.’ LISA e-journal, Vol 18, 2020.
While in residence at The Paul Auster Research Library, Dr. Varvogli will be working on her project entitled, “Solitude, Creativity and Domestic Space in Paul Auster’s Fiction.”