Professor Emeritus of French Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (where he taught and researched for 30 years); Changjiang Chair Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the School of International Chinese Studies, East China Normal University.
He was Editor-in-Chief of French Forum, a peer-reviewed A&HCI journal in the United States, for close to 20 years, until 2026. He is the Founding Co-Editor of the “Film Cultures” book series with Peter Lang International Publishing Group, a member of the editorial or advisory board of numerous journals, and the author of over 100 refereed articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics pertaining to literature (including graphic novels) and film. He is a renowned scholar specializing in modern and contemporary French poetry (from Baudelaire to the present), fantastic fiction (esp. French, Belgian, American, British, and German), film history and theory (auteur and genre cinemas), and intermediality (film and poetry, in particular). He is regularly invited to lecture or teach at various academic or research institutions in the US, Europe, Latin America, Australia and Asia.
His representative monographs include Formules de la poésie: études sur Ponge, Leiris, Char et du Bouchet (PUF, 1999), La lettre tue. Spectre(s) de l’écrit fantastique (Septentrion, 2009), Ponge et le cinéma (Nouvelles Éditions Place, 2019), and Le « Giallo », ou l’Enfance de l’art (Classiques Garnier, 2025). His recently edited books include Screening the Paris suburbs: from the silent era to the 1990s (Manchester UP, 2018; with D. Schilling), The Cinema of Louis Malle: Transatlantic Auteur (Columbia UP, 2018), Louis Malle dans tous ses états (Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2022), and André du Bouchet et ses Autres (2003/2024; Lettres Modernes-Minard/Classiques Garnier).
