Vanessa Guignery is Professor of Contemporary English Literature and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon (France), after having taught at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris as Assistant and Associate Professor from 1996 to 2009. She was Visiting Professor at the University of Texas in Austin from January to June 2011. She has been a Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas in Austin in 2006, 2008 and 2009, and a University Affiliate in 2010 and 2012, for periods of one up to six months.

She is the author of several books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, including The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Macmillan, 2006), and Conversations with Julian Barnes (Mississippi Press, 2009), co-edited with Ryan Roberts, webmaster of julianbarnes.com. She edited a special issue of the Journal of American, British and Canadian Studies on Julian Barnes (Sibiu, 2009). She has published articles on Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Jeanette Winterson, Alain de Botton, David Lodge, Jonathan Coe and Michèle Roberts, as well as several essays and a monograph on B.S. Johnson, This is not Fiction (Sorbonne UP, 2009). She translated Jonathan Coe’s biography of B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, into French (Quidam, 2010). She is the editor of several books including (Re)mapping London (Publibook, 2008), Voices and Silence (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), Chasing Butterflies. Janet Frame's The Lagoon and Other Stories (Publibook, 2011), and the co-editor of six collections of essays on crime fiction, travel writing, literary prizes , the notion of hybridity and the work of Graham Greene.  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 now a member of the CNRS research unit LIRE.