Philippe Despoix is an expert on 18^th-century literature and takes an interest in European scientific voyages of the Enlightenment and, in particular, as a member of the Gestes admirables research group, in the role and dissemination of engravings. He is also a specialist in 20^th-century Germanic thought, and a member of the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies, where he co-directs the PUM collection. He is also a member of the trans-Atlantic doctoral academy "Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Space."

As a member of the scientific committee of the Centre de recherche sur l'intermédialité, he collaborates with the team working on "archiving in a digital age" and directs the Intermédialités journal on the history and theory of arts and letters and techniques. His current research concerns the function of the media in memory and intercultural processes. He is preparing a book that examines the relationship between photography, anthropology and history from an intermedial perspective.

Livia Monnet earned her PhD from the University of Vienna, in Austria. She taught at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany, and at the University of Minnesota, in the USA, before coming to the Université de Montréal. Her current research focuses on experimental cinema in Japan, body issues in video installations and 21^st-century media arts, and on artistic and cultural practices of ecological movements in the Asia-Pacific area. She teaches courses on a wide variety of subjects, including independent animation cinema in the 2000s, feminism in cinema and the visual arts, classical Japanese theatre, uchronia in Japanese literature and cinema, and theory and esthetics in comic strips and their film adaptations. She has received academic awards from the Canon Foundation and the German Society for East Asian studies, as well as many SSHRC research grants.

My research work and teaching deal with the relationships between the poetics of theoretical discourse and the literary field. I see the process of micro-reading as a "starting point" for a dialogue on issues in literary expression. I study the literary field from an interdisciplinary perspective, at the crossroads of the evolution of the novel, of literary theory, psychoanalysis, cinema and the plastic arts (painting and architecture). Generally speaking, I use deconstructivist theories to explore literary processes and cultural practices (experimental writing, archives). My fields of research include the use of "gender studies" and the poetics of literary translation.