Deconstruction, Posthumanism, Digital Gaming – Laurent Milesi
I am a Senior Researcher (Cercetător Ştinţific 1) and doctoral supervisor in the Institute for Advanced Environmental Research (ICAM) at West University of Timişoara, which I joined in July 2024. Previously I was Tenured Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2018-2024), Winner of the 1,000 Talents Program (2019), and Honorary Senior Research Fellow from Cardiff University (2017-2024), where I chaired the prestigious Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory (2013-2017). Before joining Cardiff University in 1995, I was a Research/Teaching Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University (1988-1991), and taught at University of Wales, Swansea (1991-1994). I also held short-term appointments as 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).
My life-long research into the Babelian problematic in Joyce’s thematic use of languages in Finnegans Wake was published as James Joyce’s Poetics of Gramma(r) and Languages at the ‘Wake’ by Editura Universității de Vest din Timișoara in 2023 (460 pp.). I have also edited James Joyce and the Difference of Language (Cambridge UP, 2003) and, with Christopher John Müller and Aidan Tynan, Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017) in the ‘Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics’ series for which I have served as co-editor since January 2014.
I am a translator of works by Jacques Derrida: (with Stefan Herbrechter) H. C. for Life, That Is to Say… (Stanford UP, 2006), Thinking out of Sight: Writings on the Arts of the Visible (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and by Hélène Cixous: Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett (Polity, 2010), Philippines (Polity, 2011), Tomb(e) (Seagull Books, 2014).
I have authored some 150 essays (excluding reviews) published in some 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.
I am also joint-editor-in-chief, with Arleen Ionescu, of Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics [ESCI, Scopus], for which I have (co-)edited 7 issues (2011, 2014, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023) with academics from Malta, China, Brazil/UK and Romania.
Main areas of expertise:
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); Psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan); Theories of the Postmodern (Jean-François Lyotard); Posthumanism (Animality, Technicity); Translation Theory; French Autofiction (Chloé Delaume); Game Studies; Genetic Criticism.
