Françoise Lavocat is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris 3, a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France, a member of the European Academy, and an honorary president of the French Society of General and Comparative Literature. In June 2021, she received an Honorary Degree in Humane Letters from the University of Chicago. Lavocat specializes in theories of fiction (fact and fiction, possible worlds, characters), early modern literature, and narratives of catastrophe. She is the author of Arcadies malheureuses, aux origines du roman moderne (Champion, 1997), La Syrinx au bûcher, Pan et les satyres à la renaissance et à l’âge baroque (Droz, 2005), Usages et théories de la fiction, la théorie contemporaine à l’épreuve des textes anciens (ed. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004), La théorie littéraire des mondes possibles (éd. CNRS, 2010), and Fait et fiction: pour une frontière (Seuil, 2016).