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Laurent Milesi  Tenured Professor

Department：English Department

Tutor：Doctoral Supervisor

Email：milesi@sjtu.edu.cn

Educational Background & Work Experience

Laurent Milesi (DPhil Oxford, Agrégé d’anglais) is Tenured Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University,  and Honorary Senior Research Fellow from Cardiff University (from 2017 onwards). He joined SJTU from Cardiff University, where he taught from 1995 to 2017 and chaired the prestigious Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory (2013-2017). Before 1995, he was a Research/Teaching Fellow, Corpus Christi College, at Cambridge University (1988-1991) and taught at University of Wales, Swansea (1991-1994). He was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Pisa (Spring 1994) and taught on Erasmus schemes at the Free University and Humboldt University, Berlin, and University of Nantes (2000, 2001, 2003).

 

He worked as External Examiner (PG degrees, PhDs, etc.) at Lancaster University; Goldsmiths College, London; University of Leeds; Birkbeck College, London; University of Glasgow (on James Joyce/modernism, various topics in Critical and Cultural Theory).

 

He has authored nearly 140 essays (excluding reviews) published in fifteen countries, including in major international journals such as James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Studies Annual, European Joyce Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, New Literary History, parallax, Paragraph, Oxford Literary Review, Revue française d'études américaines, Genesis. Revue internationale de critique génétique, etc.

 

He worked for the bilingual English-French Oxford Hachette Dictionary, 1st ed. (1994). He is proficient in several languages, especially French, English, Romanian, Italian (native/near-native); German, Spanish (fluent); Portuguese, Russian (relatively fluent).

 

He is series co-editor of ‘Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics’, Rowman & Littlefield International (founded January 2014), and, with Arleen Ionescu, joint-editor-in-chief of Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics [ESCI, Scopus], for which he has (co-)edited 5 issues (2011, 2014, 2017, 2019; forthcoming 2021) with academics from Malta, China and the UK. He is currently working on a commissioned monograph on videogames and posthumanism for the ‘Critical Posthumanisms’ series at Brill as well as on a longer-term project on ‘A Conceptual Genealogy of the Virtual’.

Teaching and Research

Main research areas:

Post/Modernist Fiction (James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon); Post/Modernist Poetry (Ezra Pound, Black Mountain Poetry, Contemporary American Poetries); Poststructuralism (Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction, Hélène Cixous, Bernard Stiegler); Psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan); Theories of the Postmodern (Jean-François Lyotard); Posthumanism (Animality, Technicity); Translation Theory; French Autofiction (Chloé Delaume); Game Studies; Genetic Criticism.

 

Main courses taught:

‘Contemporary Western Literary Theory: Saussure to the Present’ (postgraduate and PhD); ‘Frontiers in Western Literature’ (postgraduate and PhD); ‘Classics of Western Literature’ (undergraduate).

 

Main research projects and awards:

‘Double First-Class’ Developing Project. Project title: ‘A Conceptual Genealogy of the Virtual’, 2020-2022

‘Double-Class’ Construction (1000 Talents; Shanghai), 2019-2020

COST Action CA 15137 ‘European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities’, 2018-2020

 

Main monographs and journal issues:

  1. (ed. with Rodolfo Piskorski) Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 11: ‘Animality and Textuality’ (forthcoming December 2021)
  2. (ed. with Arleen Ionescu and Biwu Shang) Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 9 (2019): ‘Postclassical Narratology: Twenty Years After’, 206 pp.
  3. (ed. with Christopher Müller and Aidan Tynan) Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), viii + 364 pp. Includes ‘Believing in Deconstruction’, pp. 271-99
  4. (ed.) Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 7: ‘50 Years + – The Age of “New French Theory” (1966-1970)’ (2017), 246 pp.
  5. (ed. with Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter) parallax 21.1 (2015): ‘Deconstruction - Space - Ethics’, 127 pp. [A&HCI] Includes ‘SÉANCE TENANTE: Deconstruction in (the) Place of Ethics Now’, pp. 6-25
  6. (ed.) Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 4.1: ‘“Keep It New”: Recent Trends in Experimental Fiction in English’ (2014), 187 pp.
  7. (ed. with Ivan Callus) Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 1.2: ‘Limits of Criticism / Critique of the Limits’ (2011), 153 pp. Includes ‘Dry Ink: Arguing (to) the Limits’, pp. 7-24
  8. (ed.) James Joyce and the Difference of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), xiii + 232 pp. Includes ‘Introduction: Language(s) with a Difference’, pp. 1-27

 

Main translated works:

  1. Jacques Derrida, Thinking out of Sight: Writings on the Arts of the Visible, ed. Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó and Javier Bassas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021), xiii + 321 pp.
  2. [with additional glossary] Hélène Cixous, Tomb(e) (London: Seagull Books, 2014), viii + 255 pp.
  3. [with Additional Notes] Hélène Cixous, Philippines (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), x + 70 pp. Also partly as ‘Philippines. Sweet Prison’, Oxford Literary Review 30.2: ‘Telepathies’, ed. Nicholas Royle (2008), pp. 257-81 [A&HCI]
  4. [with Introduction and Additional Notes] Hélène Cixous, Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), xviii + 85 pp.
  5. (with Stefan Herbrechter) [with Additional Notes] Jacques Derrida, H. C. for Life, That Is to Say… (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), xiv + 173 pp.

 

Main representative articles and book chapters:

  1. ‘Freud’s Uncanny in the Posthuman Valley’, Oxford Literary Review 42.2: ‘“We Ourselves Speak a Language that is Foreign”: One Hundred Years of Freud’s Uncanny’, ed. Nicholas Royle (2020), pp. 247-51 [A&HCI]
  2. ‘Literature between Antidote and Black Magic: The Autofiction of Chloé Delaume’, in Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma, ed. Arleen Ionescu and Maria Margaroni (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020), pp. 159-85
  3. ‘Virturéalité et autogenèse. Les (re)constructions de « Chloé Delaume » sur chloedelaume.net’, Genesis. Revue internationale de critique génétique 50: ‘Aragon’, ed. Luc Vigier (2020), pp. 147-56
  4. ‘Cyber-Ego Sum: Autofiction versus Psychoanalysis’, in Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 193-210
  5. ‘De-monstrating Monsters: Unmastering (in) Derrida and Cixous’, parallax 25.3: ‘Unidentified Literary Objects’, ed. Camilla Bostock and Sarah Jackson (2019), pp. 269-87 [A&HCI]
  6. ‘“We Are All Theorists Nowadays”: The “Institutionalisation” of (French) Theory’, in French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK, ed. Irving Goh (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 15-31
  7. ‘Video-gaming in(to) Literature: “Virtual CorpoReality” in Chloé Delaume’s Corpus Simsi’, in Intermedia Games – Games Inter Media: Video Games and Intermediality, ed. Michael Fuchs and Jeff Thoss (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 153-6
  8. ‘Chinoiseries: Hallucinating Derrida Hallucinating China’, Oxford Literary Review 40.1: ‘1967 + 50: The Age of Grammatology’ (2018), pp. 95-107 [A&HCI]
  9. ‘From Mallarmé to the Event: Badiou after Derrida’, in After Derrida: Literature, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 143-58
  10. ‘Countertexting One Another: Conceptual Poetics, Flarf and Derridean Countersignature’, CounterText 1.2: ‘Toward Countertextuality’, ed. Ivan Callus and James Corby (2015), pp. 207-31
  11. ‘Cixanalyses: Towards a Reading of Anankè’, Paragraph 36.2: ‘Cixous, Derrida, Psychoanalysis’, ed. Mark Dawson, Mairéad Hanrahan and Eric Prenowitz (2013), pp. 286–302 [A&HCI]
  12. ‘Sponge Inc’, in The Animal Question in Deconstruction, ed. Lynn Turner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 70-88
  13. ‘Towards a Cryptanalysis: Genealogies of “Lit-Crypts” from Poe to the “Posts”’, parallax 15.1: ‘Inscr(i/y)ptions’, ed. Mark Dawson (2009), pp. 100-14 [A&HCI]
  14. ‘Saint-Je Derrida’, Oxford Literary Review 29: ‘Derridanimals’, ed. Neil Badmington (2008), pp. 55-75 [A&HCI]
  15. ‘Thinking (Through) the Desert (la pensée du désert) With(in) Jacques Derrida’, in The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy, ed. Martin McQuillan (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007), pp. 173-91
  16. ‘Portrait of H. C. as J. D. and Back’, New Literary History 37.1: ‘Hélène Cixous: When the Word is a Stage’, ed. Eric Prenowitz (2006), 51-70 [A&HCI]
  17. ‘Joyce, Language and Languages’, in Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (London and New York: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 144-61
  18. ‘Zo(o)graphies: “Évolutions” darwiniennes de quelques fictions animales’, in L'Animal autobiographique. Autour de Jacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1999), pp. 9-46
  19. ‘ALP in Roumanian (with some notes on Roumanian in Finnegans Wake and in the notebooks)’, in Transcultural Joyce, ed. Karen R. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 199-207
  20. ‘Figuring Out Ashbery: “The Skaters”’, Revue française d'études américaines 67: ‘La poésie américaine: constructions lyriques’ (1996), pp. 45-57 [A&HCI]
  21. ‘Finnegans Wake: The Obliquity of Trans‑lations’, in Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis: Essays, ed. Morris Beja and David Norris (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), pp. 279-89
  22. ‘A Double Decker Rabaté Review’ (Review Essay), James Joyce Quarterly 30.3 (1993), pp. 497 510 [A&HCI]
  23. ‘Metaphors of the Quest in Finnegans Wake’, in European Joyce Studies 2: ‘Finnegans Wake: Fifty Years’, ed. Geert Lernout (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 79‑107
  24. ‘Towards a Female Grammar of Sexuality: The De/Recomposition of “Storiella as she is syung”’, Modern Fiction Studies 35.3: ‘Feminist Readings of Joyce’ (1989), pp. 569-86 [A&HCI]
  25. ‘L'idiome babélien de Finnegans Wake: Recherches thématiques dans une perspective génétique’, in Genèse de Babel: Joyce et la création, ed. Claude Jacquet (Paris: CNRS, 1985), pp. 155‑215

Professional Service

Professional Service (Major, Current)

Sept. 2021-    Member of the Editorial Board of the ‘Critical Posthumanisms’ series, Brill

Aug. 2019-     Editorial Advisor for Oxford Literary Review [A&HCI]

Nov. 2015-     Editorial Advisor for Barthes Studies

Jan. 2014-      Series co-editor of ‘Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics’, Rowman & Littlefield International

2013-              Member of Northern Theory School (UK)

Sept 2011-      Editor-in-chief for Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics (joint editor-in-chief since 2017)

March 2012-  Co-founding member of the ‘Digital Games and Literary Theory’ network

1996-2002      Elected to the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation for a six-year term of office

1985-              Affiliated member of the ITEM-CNRS research group on James Joyce’s manuscripts, Paris

1984-              Member of the International James Joyce Foundation

Copyright: 2013 School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiaotong University cross ICP No. 2010919

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