Emelyn Lih

Emelyn Lih is a doctoral candidate working under the direction of Professor Denis Hollier. Her dissertation, “‘S’inscrire au drame du monde’: Récits de soi à l’épreuve du siècle,” examines a series of formally innovative autobiographical projects in twentieth-century French prose, focusing on the relationship between biographical and historical temporalities in the work of Blaise Cendrars, Michel Leiris, Claude Simon and Annie Ernaux.

After receiving her B.A. summa cum laude from Columbia University in 2012 and teaching English for a year in Andalucía, she spent two years in the Sélection internationale program at the École normale supérieure de Paris, completing a Master “Théorie de la littérature” (ENS/Paris IV/EHESS). She wrote her master’s theses on literary representations of the Spanish Civil War.

Emelyn has published several articles on Claude Simon. She is also active as a translator. Her co-translation with Ariadne Lih of the 1936 classic of ethnomusicology Origine des instruments de musique by André Schaeffner is forthcoming with Routledge.

Research and teaching interests include twentieth-century French literature, autobiography and history, hermeneutics, history of forms, Québécois literature, and contemporary French-language fiction.

Education

B.A., Columbia University; M.A., École normale supérieure de Paris; M.Phil., New York University