Geoffrey Peter Bennington

Asa G Candler Professor of Modern French Thought

EMORY UNIVERSITY

(appointed 2001-2002)

Geoffrey Bennington received his B.A. in modern languages (French and Spanish) in 1978, his M.A. in 1984, and his doctorate in French in 1984, all from Oxford University. After a research fellowship at Cambridge University, he taught French at the University of Sussex from 1983 until his move to Emory in 2001: at Sussex, he served as chair of the French department from 199094 and 199597, in which capacity he designed and implemented a new modular undergraduate curriculum in French, and also worked increasingly with graduate students from English, Philosophy, and Social and Political Thought. In 1997 he founded the Sussex Centre for Modern French Thought. His research and teaching interests include modern French literature and thought, the eighteenth century novel, and literary theory. Dr. Bennington has published extensively in both French and English; his contributions to the discussion of literature, philosophy and theory include Sententiousness and the Novel (1985); Lyotard: Writing the Event, which came out in 1988, Dudding: des noms de Rousseau, published in 1991, and, most recently, Frontières kantiennes, published in 2000; he has also published three books devoted to Derrida and deconstruction (Jacques Derrida (co-authored with Derrida, published in French in 1991, and in English in 1993); Legislations: the Politics of Deconstruction (1995), and Interrupting Derrida (2000)), and has translated many works by Derrida and other contemporary French thinkers. He is currently preparing a volume of essays on the late work of Jean-François Lyotard, and a book on the problem of reading in philosophy and literature.