Justine Feyereisen

Justine FEYEREISEN is Assistant Professor of French Studies (ATLV and AEX) at the Université libre de Bruxelles and currently a Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford where she is conducting a research project entitled “Poetics of Cosmopolitical Utopias: Challenging Borders with Literature”. She is affiliated with Wolfson College and visiting researcher at the Maison Française d’Oxford. Her PhD in Languages, Letters and Traductology at the ULB and the Université Grenoble Alpes (2015) was supported by a FNRS doctoral fellowship and exchange fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a visiting student (2014). Later she was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Berkeley (2015-2016). Her research interest include 20th-21st Literature in French (from France, the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean), postcolonial literatures, international migrations, body studies, spatial studies, utopian studies and ecocriticism. Her first book, conceptualising a new field of research in literature studies called sensopoetics, is about to be published in Classiques Garnier: “Sens: J.M.G. Le Clézio. Essai de sensopoétique”. Her most recent publications are entitled “Utopie et migration. Les murs selon Glissant et Chamoiseau” (Phantasia, 2020) and “From Sideration to Consideration: Reimagining Migration Representations with Utopian Poetry” (Routed Magazine, 2020). She is the co-editor with Paul Dirkx of “Corps” (Cahiers J.-M.G. Le Clézio, 12, 2019). Vice-President of the Association des lecteurs de J.-M.G. Le Clézio and member of the editorial board of Cahiers J.-M.G. Le Clézio.

Feyereisen’s project while at the University of Oxford is devoted to the representations, challenges and solutions that writers propose to renew the political imagination of borders. It is based on a corpus of novels, poetry and essays published in French (from France, the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean), all on migration trajectories in the Mediterranean (1999-2019). These texts seek both critical and imaginary potential of cosmopolitical utopias to explore pragmatic mobilising alternatives. Her research also aims at demonstrating how the process of writing / reading is an act with ethical and social impacts, thus contributing to provide answers to the 21st c. refugee crisis.