Dominique Jullien

Educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Dominique Jullien earned the Agrégation in Lettres Modernes and a Ph.D. from the Université Paris III–Sorbonne Nouvelle. After early appointments at Yale University, she taught at Columbia University from 1987 to 2004, developing her comparative approach to French, Latin American, and world literatures and establishing her reputation as a scholar of narrative form and intertextuality.

At UCSB, Professor Jullien continues to pursue an interdisciplinary vision of literary studies, spanning modern fiction, world literature, and media theory. Her monographs include Proust et ses modèles: les Mille et une nuits et les Mémoires de Saint-Simon, a study of Proust’s intertextual filiations (1989); Récits du Nouveau Monde: les voyageurs français en Amérique de Chateaubriand à nos jours, a study of topical recurrence in French travelogues in the Americas (1992); and Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade: Variations modernes sur les Mille et Une Nuits, a study of the transformations of the 1001 Nights in modern Western imagination (2009). Her more recent Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales (2019) explores transcultural narrative morphologies linking Western modernism and Eastern thought.

Her current research examines optical media and illusionism in literature. She co-edited Screens and Illusionism: Alternative Teleologies of Mediation with Peter J. Bloom (Edinburgh UP, 2024) and is preparing a new co-edited volume, Magic Lantern: Machines, Toys and Master Tropes and a monograph, Proust Among the Magicians.

At UCSB, Jullien has fostered interdisciplinary research, as founding director of the  Graduate Center for Literary Research (2013–2018) and later Chair of the program in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies  (2018–2023). Her teaching covers topics from "The 1001 Nights as world literature" to "Epic Heroes, Classic Texts” and "Media Techniques of Wonder", reflecting a balance of historical depth and theoretical engagement.

She has held visiting appointments at Cambridge, the École Normale Supérieure, and the University of St-Gallen, and teaches regularly at the Harvard Institute for World Literature.