Monica Manolescu
Associated chair
Marc Bloch Chair (2024-2026)
Monica Manolescu is professor of American literature and art at the University of Strasbourg and an honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She holds an agrégation in English and subsequently completed her PhD in 2005 at the University Paris 7 and her habilitation to supervise research (Habilitation à diriger des recherches) in 2017 at the same university. She is a member of the research centre SEARCH (Knowledge in the Anglophone Area: Representations, Culture, History), which she directed from 2019 to 2024. She has been co-editor-in-chief of the French American studies journal Transatlantica since 2019.
She was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (USA), in the Program for interdisciplinary studies, an honorary research fellow at the Centre for American Studies of the University of Kent (United Kingdom), and a visiting professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo (Japan).
Monica Manolescu’s interdisciplinary research explores literature and visual arts in the United States in the second half of the 20th century and up to today. She is a specialist of Vladimir Nabokov’s American period and was a founding member of the French Vladimir Nabokov Society (2011), participated in the critical edition of the 3rd volume of Nabokov’s works in the Pléiade (2021) and co-edited the Cahier de l’Herne Nabokov (2023). Her archival research led to the publication of the French edition of Véra Nabokov’s previously unpublished journal, Hurricane Lolita (Éditions de l'Herne, 2023, with Yannicke Chupin).
In addition to her research on Nabokov, she has published on contemporary American fiction and American artists associated with Minimalism, Conceptualism and Land Art. She wrote a book on urban cartographies, investigating the work of several post-war American artists who combined textual and visual elements, walking strategies and maps (Cartographies of New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
The primary focus of her research is the relationship between literature, art and mapping. She is particularly interested in the ways in which American literature and art imagine the artistic and experimental possibilities of space, in dialogue with theories of the spatial turn.
Monica Manolescu closely follows contemporary American fiction and art. She invites American writers to France on a regular basis with the LILAC research group (Laboratoire interuniversitaire de littérature américaine contemporaine). She collaborates with museum and art foundations in the United States and contributes to exhibition catalogues.
The Marc Bloch Chair
The Marc Bloch Chair in the social sciences and humanities was created in 2022, as one of three associated chair positions with a duration of two years, for Strasbourg-based researchers who have made an exceptional contribution to their field. The Chair is named in honour of Marc Bloch (1886-1944), a French historian who was a professor of medieval history at the University of Strasbourg from 1921-1936. Co-founder of the historical journal “Annales”, he was known for his work on comparative and economic history, and his interest in interdisciplinarity.
