Professor Anne Duprat FBA

Summary

Anne Duprat (b. 1969) is a French scholar specialising in theories of fiction from Antiquity to the present day (literature, film, television series) and in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European literatures. Professor of Comparative Literature (2012) and a Senior Fellow of the Institut universitaire de France, she is also an author and translator of plays, narratives, and essays.

An alumna of the École normale supérieure (Ulm-Sèvres, 1989), she received her doctorate in 1998 from Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV) with a dissertation on theories of fiction from the Italian Cinquecento to French Neoclassicism. Her research subsequently broadened to cultural transfers between Renaissance Europe and the Arab world; she has worked in particular on the circulation of tale motifs between East and West from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, as well as on the history of the corso and of Mediterranean piracy (16th–18th centuries).

Associate Professor at Paris-Sorbonne (2003–2012), she founded the Orient-Occident research group there and directed it from 2005 to 2012. A Senior Fellow of the Institut universitaire de France (2018–2023 and 2023–2028), she then founded ALEA, a research network based at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens, France) devoted to the study of chance at the crossroads of science, literature, the arts, and philosophy (2019–2024). Her work has brought to light the essential role of artifial representations in the evolution of attitudes towards risk.

Her current research focuses on the epistemology and poetics of time, between ecocriticism and diachronic theories of fiction.