djullien@frit.ucsb.edu
Phelps 5220
Dominique Jullien is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies. Trained at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, with an Agrégation de Lettres Modernes, and a PhD from Paris III, she has spent her entire teaching career in the United States (Yale, Columbia and UC Santa Barbara), and has been a Visiting Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, UK, and a Visiting Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris (2023-2024). She has also taught several times at the Harvard Institute for World Literature. She writes and lectures on a wide range of topics: on modern and contemporary fiction, particularly Proust and Borges, with a focus on intertextuality, reception studies, translation studies, East-West intercultural dialogue, travel narratives, media studies and world literature. She has published widely on the Western reception of the 1001 Nights (Proust et ses modèles: les Mille et une nuits et les Mémoires de Saint-Simon, 1989; Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade: Variations modernes sur les Mille et Une Nuits, 2009), as well as numerous articles on this subject. An interest in travel narratives yielded a book on French travelers’ descriptions of America ( Récits du Nouveau Monde: les voyageurs française en Amérique de Chateaubriand à nos jours , 1992) as well as several articles on Oriental travelogues. Her most recent monograph is Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales (2019). Her current book project looks at technologies of optical mediation and illusionism in contemporary fiction, particularly the ways in which writers (such as Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Poe or Proust) respond creatively to the challenges of a visually dominant culture. A related collection, Screens and Illusionism: Alternative Teleologies of Mediation, co-edited with Peter J. Bloom, is forthcoming with Edinburgh U. P. (“Film and Intermediality Series”) in January 2025.
At UCSB, she created and directed the Graduate Center for Literary Research (GCLR) from 2013 to 2018, and she was Chair of the program in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies from 2018 until 2023.
She teaches French literature and culture courses, and comparative literature courses on a range of topics, such as “The Artist in the Novel”; “Epic Heroes, Classic Texts”; “The 1001 Nights as / and World Literature”; “Mental States in the Novel (Proust, Woolf, Borges)”; “Writing Back”, and more. She welcomes inquiries from students with related
interests.
Link to personal website: jullien.complit.ucsb.edu/