French and Francophone Studies
Modern and contemporary French poetry (from Baudelaire to the present); 19th- and 20th-century fantastic literature (esp. French, Belgian, American, British, and German); film (French auteurs; crime and horror genres); relations between film and literature (in particular, poetry).
He is Editor-in-Chief of French Forum, a member of the editorial or advisory board of several journals, and the author of approximately 90 refereed articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics pertaining to literature (including graphic novels) and film. His single-authored books include: Formules de la poésie. Études sur Ponge, Leiris, Char et Du Bouchet (PUF, 1999); La Lettre tue. Spectre(s) de l’écrit fantastique (P. U. du Septentrion, 2009); Ponge et le cinéma (Nouvelles Éditions Place, 2019). He contributed to the prestigious Pléiade edition of Francis Ponge’s Collected Works (2002), and edited André du Bouchet et ses Autres (Ed. Les Lettres Modernes, 2003) as well as a volume of Nu(e) on French poet Yves Charnet (2009). With Jean-Michel Rabaté, he co-edited a special issue of L’Esprit créateur on Mallarmé (2000), and with Jean-Louis Leutrat and Suzanne Lindrat-Guigues he worked on the critical edition of Frédéric de Towarnicki’s script for a never-completed film by Alain Resnais, Les Aventures de Harry Dickson (Capricci, 2007). Recently edited volumes include: Screening the Paris suburbs: from the silent era to the 1990s (with Derek Schilling; Manchester UP, 2019) and The Cinema of Louis Malle, Transatlantic Auteur (Columbia UP, 2019). He is currently at work on several book projects, one of which is an attempt at theorizing “phantom cinema” (uncompleted and inherently uncompletable film projects that nonetheless endure, if only spectrally). He is regularly invited to lecture or teach at various academic or research institutions in the US, Europe, Latin America, Australia and Asia.