Nathalie Ferrand


  1. 1.Curriculum


  1. 2.Papers and lectures


  1. 3.Publications



      
 

               

        2011

                 

                                                             

        

           

          2012



          
       

 

          2019



         


         2022










 

 

Nathalie Ferrand is the director of the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. She is a Senior Research Professor (Director of Research, tenured) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.


Background

She studied at the Ecole normale supérieure (Rue d’Ulm) and obtained her doctorate in Modern Literature from the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. She holds an agrégation in Modern Literature and the Habilitation à diriger des recherches (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne). She joined ITEM in 2011 after four years at the Maison française d’Oxford and an associate membership of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford University. N. Ferrand is a former fellow of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (host institution: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich).  She has been a visiting professor at the University of Valencia (Spain, 2012), Fudan University Shanghai (2018), Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in South China (2024).


Scientific and editorial responsibilities

Member of the board of the Société française d'étude du dix-huitième siècle, of the board of trustees of the Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, and the Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung at the University of Halle. Member of the editorial board of the journals Genesis, French Studies, LIAS, Prassi ecdotiche della Modernità Letteraria, and of the editorial board of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. Member of the international scientific committee of Digital Voltaire and the Genesis Conferences. She is a member of the scientific committee of the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine and of the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet.


Director of the collection Dans l’atelier de … Essais de critique génétique published by Hermann, Paris, and co-director of the collection The Long XVIIIth Century published by Schwabe, Basel.


At ITEM, she created and directs the "Ecritures des Lumières" team and the working group on the "Manuscrits de J.-J. Rousseau". She is co-director of the Séminaire général de critique génétique.


She is a member of the pedagogical and scientific council of the ENS/PSL doctoral school (ED540).


Research interests

Genetic criticism applied to Ancien Régime texts; manuscripts and writers' archives in the Age of Enlightenment; writers' libraries and marginalia ; genetic edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse.

History, poetics and circulation of the European novel in the 18th century; literary illustration; history of reading and the book; translation studies; the early modern novel in Italy


Part of her research focuses on 18th-century novel forms, their readings and the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of their European circulation. She has devoted numerous articles and books to this subject, including Livre et lecture dans les romans français (PUF, 2002), Le roman français au berceau de la culture allemande: réception des fictions de langue française du XVIIIe siècle à Weimar (2003) and Les 250 ans de 'Candide'. Lectures et relectures (with N. Cronk, 2014). Working on the rise of the novel in Italy, she has identified the French model from which Pietro Chiari drew inspiration for his Filosofessa italiana (1753), still considered the first modern Italian novel. She is currently working on a book on the culture of the novel in 18th-century Europe (writing, translating, illustrating, reading fiction), which is the subject of her course at Guangzhou University.


Another aspect of her work focuses on the question of literary illustration in the 18th century and the relationship between text and print, in particular through two books on this subject: Livres vus, livres lus, Oxford 2009 and Traduire et illustrer le roman,Oxford 2011, and numerous recent articles.


What is writing in the 18th century? This question relates more specifically to the research she has undertaken since joining ITEM on the manuscripts of Enlightenment European writers and how they shed light on the processes of literary creation. In particular, she has devoted journal issues - Brouillons des Lumières, Genesis n°34 in 2012, I manoscritti italiani del XVIII secolo. Un approccio genetico in 2018 (with Ch. Del Vento) - , and a collective book Écrire en Europe de Leibniz à Foscolo in 2019 (CNRS-Editions) with a comparative view. She contributed to the international volume Toward a comparative history of the literary draft in Europe (2024) and wrote the chapter on the eighteenth century.


She is currently working on a genetic edition of the manuscripts of J.-J. Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, under her direction. As part of this work, she has rediscovered several missing or unknown manuscripts by Rousseau: in 2010, a 200-page booklet of La Nouvelle Héloïse; in 2011, the personal copy of the original edition of the Lettre à d'Alembert on which Rousseau made his final revisions, considered lost since the end of the 18th century (Besterman Lecture 2012, Bodleian Library, Oxford); in 2021, a draft of La Nouvelle Héloïse in a volume of Plato's Works that belonged to Rousseau now housed in the British Library.

In 2021, Rivages published her edition of three Rousseau’s short stories (La Reine Fantasque, Les Amours de Milord Édouard Bomston and Lettres à Sara) that reveal the extent of this writer's talent as a narrator.


In 2022, she published Dans l'atelier de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Genèse et interprétation (Hermann, Paris). She contributes to the Dictionnaire Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to be published by Classiques Garnier.


She contributed to the edition of Voltaire's Complete works, and wrote the critical annotation of his marginal notes to Rousseau's books for the Corpus des notes marginales (Tome VIII, Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 2012).


Other authors to whom she has dedicated publications include Diderot, Abbé Prévost, Crébillon fils, Louis-Antoine Caraccioli, Chevalier de Mouhy, Mme Riccoboni, Italian novelist Pietro Chiari, and important 18th-century illustrators such as Hubert Gravelot and Clément-Pierre Marillier.


Selected publications

Her complete list of publications comprises 128 entries (17 books, 104 articles, 7 translations) in five languages (French, English, German, Italian, Polish) and can be viewed by clicking here.


Books (selection)

1.‣ Dans l’atelier de Jean-Jacques Rousseau . Genèse et interprétation, Paris, Hermann, 2022, 222 p. (reviews in Europe, Dix-huitième siècle, Revue Rousseau, Studie francesi, Ecdotica…)

2.‣J.-J. Rousseau, Trois contes, édition, préface et notes de N. Ferrand, Paris, Rivages, 2021, 112 p.

3.‣Ecrire en Europe. De Leibniz à Foscolo, sous la direction de N. Ferrand, Paris, CNRS-Editions, 2019, 264 p.

4.‣I manoscritti italiani del XVIII secolo. Un approccio genetico, a cura di Christian Del Vento e Nathalie Ferrand, Quaderni della Rassegna della Letteratura italiana, Firenze, 2018, 221 p.

5.‣Les 250 ans de ‘Candide’. Lectures et relectures, sous la direction de Nicholas Cronk et Nathalie Ferrand, Louvain-Paris-Walpole, Peeters, 2014, 636 p.

6.‣Corpus des notes marginales de Voltaire, Tome VIII, volume 143 des Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, préface et notes éditoriales aux œuvres de Rousseau par Nathalie Ferrand, Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 2012 (pp. 76-189; 443-523)

7.‣Genesis n°34 Brouillons des Lumières, sous la direction de N. Ferrand, 2012, 162 p.

  1. 8.‣Traduire et illustrer le roman au XVIIIe siècle, sous la direction de N. Ferrand, Oxford, SVEC, 2011:05, 386 p.

  2. 9.‣Livres vus, livres lus. Une traversée du roman illustré des Lumières,  Oxford, SVEC, 2009:03, 282 p.

  3. 10. ‣ Livre et lecture dans les romans français du XVIIIe siècle, Paris, PUF, 2002, 383 p.


Articles (selection)

  1. ‣‘18th Century: The progressive emergence of 18th century literary manuscripts’, in Toward a comparative history of the literary draft in Europe, Dirk van Hulle, Olga Beloborodova (eds.), Amsterdam / Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2024, pp. 47-59

  2. ‣‘La Nouvelle Héloïse de J.-J. Rousseau. Un roman européen vu de Chine’, in Transfert littéraire. Concept et pratique en France et en Chine, sous la direction de Mingjie Zhao et Yuning Cheng, Editions Du Lérot, 2024, pp. 63-81

  3. ‣‘Putting Oneself in the Light: Rousseau and the Frontispieces of His Works’, in Pictures of the Enlightenment/ Bilder der Aufklärung, Elisabeth Décultot and Daniel Fulda (eds.), Brill Fink, 2024, pp. 115-132

  4. ‣‘Variation sur Prométhée et le satyre : la genèse du frontispice de Gravelot pour le Discours sur les sciences et les arts’, Genesis n° 50, 2020, pp. 167-175

  5. ‣‘Rousseau traducteur de l’italien dans La Nouvelle Héloïse ? Ou de la nostalgie des lectrices du Grand siècle’, in Littéraire. Pour Alain Viala, Artois Presses Université, tome II, 2018, pp. 21-29

  6. ‣‘Le paradoxe des manuscrits de Kehl’, Avant-propos au Volume 34 des Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 2016, pp. XXIII-XXV

  7. ‣‘Illustrer Diderot. Ses romans face au supplément de la gravure’, Diderot Studies n° 34, juillet 2014 [paru en 2016], pp. 53-70

  8. ‣‘Un voyage au long cours dans l’écriture de Rousseau. Analyse génétique d’une lettre de Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (IV,3) ’, in Genesis n° 41, 2015, pp. 165-186

  9. ‣‘Transparences accrues. La génétique des textes et les Lumières’, in Dix-huitième siècle, n° 46, 2014, pp. 139-152

  10. ‣‘Translating and illustrating the eighteenth century novel’, in Word & Image, 30. 4, 2014, pp. 181-193

  11. ‣‘Rétrograder avec Jean-Jacques. Une édition des manuscrits de La Nouvelle Héloïse’, in Annales Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Tome 51, 2014, pp. 381-405

  12. ‣‘Hamlet dans La Nouvelle Héloïse. La leçon d’arts visuels de Gravelot à Rousseau’, in French Studies, 67.4, October 2013, pp. 494-507

  13. ‣‘L’abbé Prévost, auteur galant ?’, in Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 2013, n° 2, pp. 279-288

  14. ‣‘L’illustration des œuvres de Rousseau’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les arts, Paris, Editions du Patrimoine-Centre des Monuments Nationaux, 2012, pp. 54-66

  15. ‣‘Un manuscrit retrouvé de La Nouvelle Héloïse’, LIAS. Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources, 38/02, December 2011, pp. 357-389

  16. ‣‘Les circulations européennes du roman français, leurs modalités et leurs enjeux’, in Les circulations internationales en Europe 1680-1780, Presses Universitaires de Rennes II, 2010, pp. 399-410


Teaching and direction of research


  1. ‣Course on ‘Genetic criticism: texts and forms’ (Master 1 Theory of literature), Ecole normale supérieure, Paris

  2. ‣Course ‘Writing in the 18th Century. Creation and cultural transfers in Europe’

  3. ‣Programme director ‘Creative writing processes in Early Modern European Manuscripts and Books’ at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes, Paris


Grants and awards


  1. ‣Research programme funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (2006-2009)

  2. ‣Research fellowship, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (2004-2005)

  3. ‣Research programme funded by PSL (2013 and 2015-2019)

  4. ‣Research programme funded by Labex TransferS (2017-2019)

  5. ‣Research programme funded by EUR Translitterae (2018-2023)

Address:

Institut des Textes et Manuscrits modernes, (IETM, UMR 8132), CNRS- Ecole normale supérieure, 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris

www.item.ens.fr

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