Lara DELAGE-TORIEL

Duncan WHITE

Lara Delage-Toriel is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Strasbourg. She wrote a PhD Dissertation entitled «Ultraviolet Darlings: Representations of Women in Nabokov’s Prose Fiction» at Cambridge University (2001). She is also the founding president of the French Nabokov Society. Initially aimed at enabling French scholars from different backgrounds to collaborate and promote Nabokov’s work, the Society has helped develop a broader dialogue between French and international scholarship, through its two International Conferences (Paris 2013, Biarritz 2016) and a Doctoral Day (Strasbourg 2014). It has also fostered dialogues with other readerships, notably with visual artists, dancers and musicians, as well as encouraged greater familiarity with Nabokov’s works within the general public. As part as these initiatives, Lara has created various artistic projects around Nabokov: "Nabokov in the Classroom" (a radio documentary, 2008, with Xavier Fassion), "A Guide to Berlin in Strasbourg" (a film documentary on twin artists Natalia and Maria Petschatnikov, 2015, with Sophie Bernard-Léger); she has also composed and performed two musical readings (on Lolita, 2009, on "Mademoiselle O"/Chapter 5 of Speak, Memory, 2014), as well as a soundpainting performance on Lolita with dancer Burcu Yilmaz, and students and teachers from the University of Strasbourg (2015).

Duncan White is a lecturer in History & Literature at Harvard, where he teaches twentieth century American, British, and Russian literature. Earlier this year he published Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace with Oxford University Press. In 2009, he co-edited Transitional Nabokov, a volume of essays by leading scholars in the field and has published various pieces on Nabokov and his work. He is currently writing a literary history of the Cold War.