Vanessa Guignery is Professor of Contemporary English Literature and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France), after having taught at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris as Lecturer, Assistant and Associate Professor from 1996 to 2009. She was Visiting Professor at the University of Texas in Austin in 2011 and Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University in Evanston (Illinois) in April 2017. She was a Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas in Austin in 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2016, and has been a University Affiliate and Scholar there since 2010 for periods of one up to six months. She was a Junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France between 2012 and 2017. In 2020-2022, she was on secondment as a research scholar at the CNRS research unit ITEM, specialised in genetic criticism. She was a Visiting Researcher at the CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) in New Delhi, India, in January-April 2022. She is currently Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon.

Vanessa Guignery is the author of several books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, including Julian Barnes from the Margins. Exploring the Writer’s Archives (Bloomsbury, 2020), The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Macmillan, 2006), and Conversations with Julian Barnes (Mississippi Press, 2009), co-edited with Ryan Roberts, the webmaster of julianbarnes.com. She has published articles on Jonathan Coe, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts, Alain de Botton, David Lodge, Janet Frame, Ben Okri, Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips and Alice Munro, as well as several essays and a monograph on B.S. Johnson, Ceci n'est pas une fiction (Sorbonne UP, 2009). She translated Jonathan Coe’s biography of B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, into French (Quidam, 2010) and edited the correspondence between B.S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). She is the author of Seeing and Being: Ben Okri's The Famished Road (PUF, 2012) and of a monograph on Jonathan Coe for Palgrave Macmillan (2016). She is the editor and co-editor of about fifteen books on contemporary literature in English and regularly conducts interviews with writers. From 2000 to 2009, she co-directed the research center ERCLA ("Writings of the Contemporary Novel in English") at the University of La Sorbonne. She is a permanent member of the CNRS research unit IHRIM and the President of the SEAC (Société d'Études Anglaises Contemporaines). She is Associate Editor of the scholarly journal Études Anglaises.