Officers

Inge-Birgitte Siegumfeldt (chair) is Associate Professor in Contemporary Anglophone Literature, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She specializes in Jewish aspects of Yale School Criticism and Deconstructive theory and is particularly interested in the self-reflexive dimension of Paul Auster’s work on the page and in pictures. Based on conversations that took place over more than five years, she and Auster co-authored A Life in Words. Paul Auster in Conversation with I.B. Siegumfeldt (2017). It has since been translated into a number of languages. Other selected publications on Auster are the bi-lingual special edition New Avenues in Paul Auster’s Twenty-First Century Writing, co-edited w. F. Hugonnier (2020) and ”The Author as Reader: Reading Auster Reading Crane” published in Critique (2021). She is director of The Paul Auster Research Library, home to The Auster Archive and host to the annual Research Fellowship in studies of Auster’s work.

Aliki Varvogli (co-chair) is a Senior Lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Dundee in Scotland. She wrote her PhD thesis on Paul Auster’s fiction (University of East Anglia, 1998) and since then she has been publishing on 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.

Jesús Ángel González is a professor of English at the University of Cantabria, Spain, where he teaches English and American literature and culture. His research interests include the intersections of film and literature, as well as the effects of the Western film genre and myth in different parts of the world. He co-edited with Stefania Ciocia The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster (Cambridge Scholars, 2011), and has published several articles on Auster, like “Words versus Images: Paul Auster’s films from Smoke to The Book of Illusions” and “Happy Accidents: An Interview with Paul Auster”, both in  Literature/Film Quarterly (2009), “‘Another History’: Alternative Americas in Paul Auster’s Fiction”, in Comparative American Studies (2011), “Subterranean Autobiographies: The ‘Solitude Trilogy’ versus The New York Trilogy, in Critical Engagements (2013), and “Del caballero de los espejos a La ciudad de cristal: Reflejos especulares cervantinos en la obra de Paul Auster”, in Cervantes y la posteridad: 400 años de legado cervantino  (Ed. Iberoamericana, 2019).

François Hugonnier is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Angers, France. He has explored Paul Auster’s early poetry and prose, his Jewish roots, and post-9/11 fiction. His monograph Les interdits de la representation. Paul Auster, Jerome Rothenberg was published by Otrante in 2022. In collaboration with I. B. Siegumfeldt, he also co-edited a collection of essays entitled New Avenues in Paul Auster’s Twentieth-Century Work (LISA e-journal, 2020). Other pieces include “Speaking the Unspeakable: Auster’s Semiotic World” (Cambridge SP, 2011), “L’artiste faussaire : The Brooklyn Follies de Paul Auster” (RFEA, 2012), “Poetry in and out of The New York Trilogy” (Critical Engagements, 2013), “Unsaying in Paul Auster’s Poetry” (Anglophonia, 2014), “The Physicality of Writing in Paul Auster’s White Spaces and Winter Journal” (Angles, 2015), “Auster’s Narratives of Traumatic Temporality” (Gdańsk UP, 2015), and « Enfouissement du témoignage et archivage oraculaire : Oracle Night de Paul Auster » (Sillages Critiques, 2017).

James Peacock is Reader in English and American Literatures at Keele University in the UK. He specialises in contemporary fiction and has a particular interest in the intersections of economics, class, ethnicity and gender in gentrifying urban neighbourhoods. His PhD thesis, completed at the University of Edinburgh in 2006, was on Paul Auster, and he has published regularly on Auster’s work since then. Understanding Paul Auster was published by University of South Carolina Press in 2010. His 2015 monograph, Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age (Bloomsbury), contained 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).