Microscopic Life in Early-Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance

Sarah Bouttier is Assistant Professor of English at the École Polytechnique in Paris (IP Paris) and a member of Prismes (Sorbonne Nouvelle). She has published widely on the nonhuman in literature and modern and contemporary poetry as well as on posthumanism, ecofeminism and literature and science. Sarah is co-editor of Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction, Ethics (Palgrave). She is the author of a forthcoming monograph, Ecopoetics of Agency: Writing With The Nonhuman in Modernist and Contemporary Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2026).

François-Joseph Lapointe is an artscientist from Montréal (Canada) with a PhD in evolutionary biology and a PhD in dance and performance studies. As a scientist, he has published 150 papers ranging from molecular systematics and population genetics to metagenomics. As an artist, he applies biotechnology as a means of dance composition, and he has created the field of choreogenetics. For his recent projects, he is sequencing his microbiome (and that of other humans) to produce microbiome selfies. His work has been exhibited in the USA, Canada, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Denmark, UK, Chile, and Australia.

Sarah Montin is Senior Lecturer in literature and translation at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle. She is interested in questions of aesthetics and ethics in crisis. She has published Contourner l’abîme. Les poètes-combattants britanniques à l’épreuve de la Grande Guerre (Sorbonne Université Presses) among other works on poetry, conflict and memory, and has widened her critical explorations to contemporary ecopoetics. She has recently edited Pandemic Occasions: Poetry in the Time of Covid-19 (ANGLES, 2024) and Crises: Climate and Criticism (Epistémocritique, 2023) with Sarah Bouttier, Pierre-Louis Patoine and Theo Mantion.