Petra James
Petra James is professor in the Départment de Languages et Lettres, Faculté de Lettres, Traduction et Communication, Université libre de Bruxelles.
She obtained her PhD in Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies at Université Paris-Sorbonne and Masaryk University (co-tutelle) in 2009. Since 2011, she holds the Chair of Czech Studies at ULB. Her research focuses on the comparative history of modernism and the avant-garde. Her book Bohumil Hrabal: Composer un monde blessant à coups de ciseaux et de gomme arabique, which compares the Czech post-avant-garde with the French and American neo-avant-garde movements was published in 2012 by Les Classiques Garnier in Paris. Between 2021-2023, she was the Head of Départment de Languages et Lettres (LTC, ULB).
She is one of the editors-in-chief of the encyclopaedic project Cultural History of Central European Avant-Gardes (Brill/ Rodopi, in progress), aiming at fundamentally rethinking the comparative history of European avant-gardes.
She is the author of numerous articles, editor/ co-editor of a dozen of special issues of peer-reviewed journals and collective monographs.
She was a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (spring semester 2019) and will be the visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley (spring semester 2024).
Petra James delivered more than 100 conference presentations and invited lectures at prestigious universities around the world, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Trinity College Dublin, Sorbonne University, Charles University, Central European University, Warsaw University, Humboldt University etc. She has taken part in academic events at major international venues in the USA, Germany, Belgium, Russia, the UK, the Netherlands, Finland, Serbia, France, Canada, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary.
She has (co)-supervised/ is currently supervising 6 doctoral theses related to her expertise.
In 2022, she founded the MODERNITAS research centre (the centre is co-directed by Petra James and Dennis Ioffe) at ULB’s Maison des Sciences Humaines. The centre’s ambition is to offer research on modernisms and modernity from an interdisciplinary perspective, notably in collaboration with natural sciences and researchers in economy.
In this interdisciplinary perspective, Petra James is the principal promoter of several prestigious grant projects. The ARC project (in collaboration with Dennis Ioffe, 2022-2027) “The Artist, the Scientist and the Industrialist” is dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of modernisms and avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe.
She is the promoter of the research project “When Rural Meets Urban”, funded by the Wiener-Anspach Foundation (2022-2024) and co-promoted by Rajendra Chitnis at Oxford University. The project focuses on neglected aspects of modernism in Bohemia, including its transnational nature and the comparative context of regional European modernisms.
She was the Plumer Visting Research Fellow at Saint-Anne’s College, University of Oxford (Trinity Term, April-June 2023) and resident at the Maison française d’Oxford (April 2023; October-November 2023). While at Oxford, she (co)-organized two workshops (April 2023; November 2023), bringing together leading Oxford specialists in modernist studies.
The special issue of the Revue Belge de Philologie et Histoire ‘Pastoral’ et ‘Regional’ Modernisms in Nordic and Slavic Literatures (1900s-1930s), edited by Petra James and Harri Veivo (Université de Caen, France) was published in December 2022. The special issue of Russian literature (newly Slavic Literatures), co-edited by Petra James and Rajendra Chitnis, entitled “When Rural Meets Urban” will be published in 2024. Petra James and Rajendra Chitnis are currently preparing a monograph on the representation of nature and rurality in Czech modernism (to be published in 2024).
Her research is also funded by two FER grants (Fonds d’encouragement à la recherche; 2022; 2023) of Conseil de la recherche de l’ULB.
Petra James translates from and into French. In 2022, she co-edited and co-translated (in collaboration with Jean-Gaspard Páleníček) an anthology of Petr Hruška’s poetry entitled Je cherche le peintre aux doigts blancs... (Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 2022).
