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Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont.  He specializes in 19th and 20th-century literature with emphasis on poetry and the novel and the relations among literature, philosophy, and music.  He is the author of five books including Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the Recherche (2017), The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy (2015), and French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music (2006).  He is currently completing a book on poetry and ways of knowing, and working on another about the esthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of modern pessimism.

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Bruce Baugh is Professor of Philosophy at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, Canada. He is editor and translator of Benjamin Fondane’s Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays (NYRB Classics, 2016) and author of French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (Routledge, 2003). He has published over a dozen articles and book chapters on Benjamin Fondane’s thought, including “Private thinkers, untimely thoughts: Deleuze, Shestov and Fondane,” Continental Philosophy Review Volume 48 (2015) and “Amor fati in Deleuze, Shestov, Fondane and Nietzsche,” in Minor Ethics: Deleuzian Variations, ed. Casey Ford, Suzanne McCullagh and Karen Houle (forthcoming; McGill-Queen’s University Press).

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Michel Carassou holds a doctorate in modern literature from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He has always worked both as a publisher and a researcher. After having been editorial director of CNRS Éditions, he founded and directed first the Paris-Méditerranée editions, and in 2005 the Non Lieu editions. As a researcher, his publications have focused on avant-gardes, Dada and Surrealism, on René Crevel, Jacques Vaché, Claude Cahun and especially Benjamin Fondane. His last title published in this field is Le Surrealisme par les textes (Classiques Garnier, 2013) in collaboration with Henri Béhar. He also focused on the history of literary journals and the history of homosexuality in the 20th century (Inversions, Non Lieu, 2016). Nowdays he mainly devotes  himself  to Fondane’s works.

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Nadja Cohen is an FWO post-doctoral researcher at KU Leuven (Belgium) who specializes in the relationship between literature and cinema. She published Les Poètes modernes et le cinéma: 1910-1930 (Garnier, 2013), Fondane et le cinéma (Jean-Michel Place, 2016) and several studies on writers’ scripts, poetic novelizations, the representation of writers on screen (« Les écrivains à l’écran », revue Captures, vol. 2, n°1,  juin 2017. Online: http://www.revuecaptures.org/dossier/écrivains-à-l’écran) or the notion of poetic film (http://www.mdrn.be/news/cfp-mdrn-colloquium-un-cinéma-poétique-8-9-febr-2019). She also co-directed Petit musée d’histoire littéraire (Les Impressions nouvelles, 2015) and “Un je-ne-sais-quoi de poétique” (LHT, n°18, 2017 http://www.fabula.org/lht/18/).

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Alexander Dickow is a scholar, translator, and poet who works in French and English. He is associate professor of French at Virginia Tech. He has published translations of Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, Henri Droguet, and others. A translation of the work of Swiss poet Gustave Roud, translated with Sean T. Reynolds, is forthcoming from Seagull Press. Scholarly works include Le Poète innombrable (2015), and poetic works include Caramboles (2008), Rhapsodie curieuse (2017), and Appetites (forthcoming from MadHat Press). You can find out more about Dickow at www.alexdickow.net.

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Cosana Eram is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature at University of the Pacific, California. She obtained a PhD in French and Humanities at Stanford University (2010) and a doctorate magna cum laude in Philology at the University of Bucharest, Romania (2003), With a primary research focus on international avant-garde and modernism, she has a book in Romanian on the literary canon and has published on world literature, art, film and cultural studies. Her focus has been on artists such as Tristan Tzara, Isidore Isou, Benjamin Fondane and Victor Brauner. She is currently finishing a book titled ScanDADAl: The Avant-Garde Logic of Dispute. 

More info here: https://goo.gl/NsnNz5

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Ramona Fotiade is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow and Director of the Lev Shestov Studies Society. She has a long-established publication track in film studies and existential philosophy. In 2016 she curated the exhibition, Léon Chestov - La Pensée du dehors at the Mairie du 6e in Paris, devoted to the sesquincentenary of the existential thinker; she edited the exhibition catalogue and co-produced and scripted a short documentary film released during the exhibition. Her recent publications in visual culture include an essay on Bazin, Surrealism and Postmodernism published in The Major Realist Film Theorists critical anthology edited by Ian Aitken (EUP, 2016), a chapter in the Companion to Luis Bunuel (Willey-Blackwell, 2013), and a monograph on Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2013). In 2010 she helped curate The Surrealist House, a major international exhibition at the Barbican Arts Centre (London). On this occasion, she wrote five short essays on French cinema and Surrealist architecture for the exhibition catalogue (The Surreal House, Yale University Press, 2010).  In 2007 she edited the new critical and annotated edition of Benjamin Fondane's Ecrits pour le cinéma (Editions Verdier). She is also the author of Conceptions of the Absurd: From Surrealism to the Existential Thought of Chestov and Fondane (Legenda 2001).

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Eric Freedman is a founding member and former President  of the Société d’Etudes Benjamin Fondane, and a member of the editorial board of the Fondane Association in Paris. He has published a bibliography of Fondane (Paris, Editions Non Lieu, 2009) and Fondane’s Collected French Plays (Paris, Editions Non Lieu, 2012), in addition to many articles.

Since 2001, he has been a consultant to the Wiesenthal Center Europe, attached to the French government commission on Holocaust-era spoliation indemnification, and since 2003 he has been European Advisor and Visiting Professor, Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights, Cardozo Law School, New York.

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Benjamin Guerin received an M.A. in Philosophy and in History from the University of Montpellier (France.) His work is focused on French thought during the Thirties, with a particular interest in Benjamin Fondane, Lev Shestov and Jacques Maritain. His poems are published in French journals of poetry (Nunc, Arpa,…) and his book Forgotten Metropolis (Lucie éd., 2016) has been translated into English for Gutter’s Magazine in the U.K. in 2017. He is also an art ceramist. His latest conferences were at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris, oct. 2016), Sorbonne University (Paris, Apr. 2016), Cluj Napoca University (Romania, Jun. 2015), and Montpellier University (Apr. 2015). His recent articles include "Maritain & Lacombe," Dossier H Maritain, Age d’Homme, 2018 (20 p.), "Maritain & Bergson" (with F. Blondeau), Dossier H Maritain, Age d’Homme, 2018 (20 p.), "Fondane à la croisée de l’existentialisme, du thomisme et de l’indianisme," Titanic, Paris, oct. 2016 (20 p.), and "L’amitié Maritain-Fondane," in Colocviu despre arta si binele comun, Surorilor, Romania, 2016 (22 p.).

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Chantal Ringuet is a Canadian award-winning author, scholar and translator. She is the author of collections of poems (2009 Jacques-Poirier literary award) and of works on Yiddish Montreal. With Gérard Rabinovitch, she has published Les révolutions de Leonard Cohen (PUQ, 2016), which received a 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award. With Pierre Anctil, she has published a translation of the early biography of Marc Chagall (Mon univers. Autobiographie, Fides, 2017). She has been a Fellow of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, Scholar-in-Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (Brandeis University) and Writer-in-Residence and literary translator in residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. 

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Olivier Salazar-Ferrer is Lecturer in French and Philosophy at the University of Glasgow (UK). His research focuses primarily on twentieth-century French literature, and the interaction between literary writing, philosophy, and the visual arts, with particular emphasis on European avant-garde movements.  He is the author of Benjamin Fondane(Oxus, 2004), and Benjamin Fondane et la révolte existentielle(De Corlevour, 2007) two monographic studies devoted to the life and work of the avant-garde poet, philosopher and essayist Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944) as well as several publications on travel writing (J.M.G Le Clezio et la philosophie: 2015; L’Usage du monde de Nicolas Bouvier: 2016).  He has published articles and book chapters on a range of twentieth-century French authors at the crossroads between philosophy and literature, or between literature and the visual arts (Rachel Bespaloff, Kierkegaard, Marguerite Yourcenar, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Joyce Mansour, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono).  He is the co-editor of Fondane, Ecrits pour le cinéma(Verdier, 2008) with Ramona Fotiade and Michel Carassou and co-editor of the journal Titanic - Bulletin International Benjamin Fondane. His latest book (which is in press) is La Chronique japonaise de Nicolas Bouvier (Infolio), co-authored with Saeko Yazaki.​
 

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Joel Swanson is a graduate student in religious studies. He studies modern Jewish intellectual history, with a focus on French Jewish thought. He is particularly interested in the appropriation of earlier Jewish literary and religious sources as tools for constructing counter-narratives to philosophical rationalism and universalism, and in methodological questions concerning the usage of poetry and literature in philosophical discourses. He also studies the conflict between private confessional and ethnic understandings of Jewish identity in prewar France. He recently presented conference papers on Gustave Kahn and Edmond Jabès, and he has translated several works by French Jewish writers into English.

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