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Alexandre Gefen

Senior Research Director — CNRS

Alexandre Gefen

UMR THALIM — CNRS · Sorbonne Nouvelle · ENS
Member of the Academia Europaea
Founder of Fabula.org
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About

I am a Senior Research Professor (Directeur de recherche) at the CNRS, based at THALIM (Theory and History of the Arts and Literatures of Modernity, UMR 7172, Sorbonne Nouvelle / ENS Paris). As an intellectual historian and literary theorist, I am interested in what literature does — to its readers, to its societies, to its time: in its functions, its powers, its individual and collective effects.

My research began with the genre of biographical fiction and the work of Marcel Schwob, whose Œuvres I edited for Les Belles Lettres. It then expanded toward the theory of fiction and toward contemporary French writing. I have sought to broaden the scope of literary studies by including digital and amateur writing, non-fiction, the new literary realisms, and contemporary concerns such as trauma, care, and what I have proposed to call a “literature of repair” — the hypothesis, developed in Réparer le monde (Corti, 2017), that twenty-first-century French literature has largely redefined itself around therapeutic, memorial, and political functions. L’Idée de littérature (Corti, 2021) extended this inquiry by tracing the shift from l’art pour l’art to writing as intervention.

A graduate of the agrégation in modern literature and a doctor of the University of Paris-Sorbonne, with a Habilitation à diriger des recherches, I held a postdoctoral position at the University of Neuchâtel before becoming Associate Professor at the University of Bordeaux 3 and entering the CNRS, first as a Research Fellow at the Centre d’étude de la langue et des littératures françaises (Paris-Sorbonne) and later at THALIM. For eight years, I served as Deputy Scientific Director of CNRS Humanities and Social Sciences, in charge of interdisciplinarity and then of the “Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts” section of the National Committee for Scientific Research; in this capacity I coordinated the open-access volume Un monde commun. Le savoir des sciences humaines et sociales (CNRS Éditions, 2023).

I founded Fabula.org in 1999, which has since become one of the leading international platforms for literary theory and criticism. This long-standing project led me early to the digital humanities, of which I have been one of the French pioneers — La Littérature, une infographie (CNRS Éditions, 2022, with Guillemette Crozet) is one of its outcomes, and a synthesis volume, Humanités numériques: Knowledge and Teaching in the Age of AI, is forthcoming with Hermann in 2026.

I have led several funded research projects: an ANR program coordinated with Carole Talon-Hugon and Sandra Laugier on the powers of the arts and the theory of emotions (2011–2015); a transatlantic program with Franco Moretti on the empirical history of literature (FMSH–Mellon Foundation, 2015–2018); the Fabula 2020 project on the open-data publication of literary criticism (FNSO, 2020–2023); and the ANR project CulturIA. Toward a Cultural History of Artificial Intelligence (2021–2025), of which I was the principal investigator.

Artificial intelligence has become, in recent years, a major area of inquiry for me — not as a tool, but as an object of cultural history, an aesthetic problem, and a challenge to thought. CulturIA led to the publication of Créativités artificielles (Les Presses du réel, 2023) and Vivre avec ChatGPT (L’Observatoire, 2023), to the special issue “Philosophies of AI” of Intellectica (co-edited with Philippe Huneman), and to numerous events — including the two-day conference L’IA en question held at the Centre Pompidou in 2025. I have also co-curated two exhibitions on these issues: MirabilIA at the Centre d’Art d’Enghien-les-Bains (2024) and The World According to AI: Exploring Latent Spaces at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (2025), whose catalogue was published by JBE Books together with Ada Ackerman, Antonio Somaini, and Pia Viewing.

Several of my books have been translated or are forthcoming in translation. Réparer le monde has appeared in English as Repair the World: French Literature in the Twenty-First Century (De Gruyter, “Culture & Conflict” series, 2024, open access), and was reviewed in Critical Inquiry; Vivre avec ChatGPT has been translated into Italian by Treccani Libri (2024) and is forthcoming in Chinese; L’Idée de littérature is forthcoming in Romanian. My essays and articles have also been translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese, and I have published in journals such as Esprit, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Poetics Today, Critical Inquiry, Neohelicon, and the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte. I have been a visiting professor at Gakushūin University (Tokyo, 2014 and 2018) and in Florence (2026), and I have lectured at some fifty universities abroad — including Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Santa Barbara, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Lausanne, Milan, Buenos Aires, Montréal, Newcastle, Bucharest, and Beijing.

A member of the Academia Europaea, I am the author of around 200 articles and book chapters and some fifty edited volumes, journal issues, and essays. I contribute regularly to public debate on the cultural stakes of artificial intelligence.

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Recent Publications (HAL)

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