Anne Simon (3) (1967–)

Anne Simon is a director of research at the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research), specializing in 20th and 21st century French and Francophone literature. She is a graduate of the prestigious École normale supérieure with a degree in Literature, a doctorate of Paris Sorbonne (1999), and is habilitated to supervise research. In 2001, she was appointed to the unit THALIM/ Écritures de la modernité (Sorbonne nouvelle), and later joined the CRAL in September 2010.
She studies narrative prose combining thematic, stylistic, and interdisciplinary approaches (i.e. philosophy, sociology, gender studies, ethology, animal studies, ecopoetics). Her research lies at the intersection of two main themes: the expression of the sensible (in the post-phenomenological sense of the term) and the living, and the relationship between thought and literary creation.
Responsible for core Proustian research at the CRAL, she first worked on the perception of reality in In Search of Lost Time by drawing on Merleau-Ponty 's phenomenology in an attempt to restore the issue of reference in literature. She recently completed an essay on the major role Proust plays in the works of certain French thinkers from 1950 to 1980 (forthcoming) as well as a collection of articles on Proust (forthcoming in Classiques-Garnier). She has also organized the first meeting in the cycle of conferences dedicated to Proust : la pensée, l’émotion, l’écriture (Proust: Thought, Emotion, Writing; video here).
Within the past ten years, she has expanded her research on the sensible to include issues of the living, corporeality, and animality. Attentive to the relationship between science, knowledge, and literary creation, she has brought into her line of work the organic and bodily mutations (Organismes seminar), and addressed questions of the consistent and the renewed in representations of the female body. She is currently focusing her research on the question of animality in literature from an ecopoetic perspective, and she heads the research project “Animots,” supported by a large grant from the French National Research Agency.
Within this framework, she has co-organized the 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone International Colloquium centered on the theme “human-animal”, and has taught numerous seminars (L’animal entre sciences et littérature, Histoires de bêtes,Questions de Zoopoétique, Littérature et pensées du vivant) at the Sorbonne nouvelle, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, or at the École Normale Supérieure.