Bénédicte Meillon is Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor) in English Studies at the Université de Perpignan Via Domitia (UPVD, in Perpignan) where she teaches mostly translation and literature (the short story, North American literature, ecopoetics and postcolonial literature).

She is a member of the Perpignan CRESEM (Centre de REcherche sur les Sociétés et Environnements en Méditérranée) research laboratory. She has founded and runs the Ecocriticism & Ecopoetics workshop at the University of Perpignan. To fill a gap in French studies and language at the time, she has conceived and has been monitoring a mailing list and a website, cocreated in 2015 with the help of Dr. Margot Lauwers, to promote research in France in ecopoetics and ecocriticism:  http://ecopoeticsperpignan.com/). She in on the EASLCE advisory board.

She is a member

of the following academic associations:

The AFEA, Association Française d’Etudes Américaines

The SAES : Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur

ASLE Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

EASLCE: European Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (Advisory Board Member): https://www.easlce.eu/about-us/board/

The liter(n)ature project founded by Pierre Schoentjes in 2018: https://www.literature.green/communaute/.

She has written a PhD on Barbara Kingsolver’s short stories, which she defended in 2005 at the University of Toulouse-le-Mirail. Her Master’s thesis, defended in 1999 also at the University of Toulouse, had first focused on an ecofeminist reading of Kingsolver’s first novel, The Bean Trees. She is a specialist of the short story in English, of magical realism, ecofeminism, and ecopoetics. She has also worked on Paul Auster’s and Russel Banks’ works, on various aspects of translation, of postcolonialism and mythopoeia in Barbarbara Kingsolver’s writing, and on the representation of aviation in the arts and literature, mostly Roald Dahl’s aviation short stories. She has been working on ecofeminist and ecopoetic readings of  Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories, as well as the rewriting of myths and fairy tales in Proulx’s short fiction. She has in the past few years been focusing more and more on Ecocriticism and Ecopoetics, and is devoted to the advance of the field in France. She has recently been writing ecocritical and ecopoetical readings of  works by Linda Hogan, Barbara Kingsolver, Ron Rash, and Ann Pancake.

She designed the website http://ecopoeticsperpignan.com/, which was first dedicated to the International Ecopoetics Conference in Perpignan, June 2016 (videos, interviews, abstracts and photo gallery on line). She then worked closely with Dr. Margot Lauwers on the restructuring of the website, making it grow into a platform for the advance of Ecocriticsm & Ecopoetics in France.

Bénédicte Meillon spent four years of her life as a child in Phoenix, Arizona. She later on spent one year in England, teaching French as a French Assistant at Marlborough College, in Wiltshire. Before teaching at the UPVD, she has worked as a Professeur Agrégée at the French Civil Aviation School (ENAC: Ecole Nationale de l’Aviation Civile), in Toulouse from 2007 to 2011. She has also lectured at the University of Toulouse-Le-Mirail for six years, first while writing her PhD as Allocataire-Monitrice, then as a full-time Attaché Temporaire à l’Enseignement et à la Recherche (ATER), and then as Professeur Agrégée (PRAG).

Her pride and joy are her two daughters, whom she loves more than anything else in the world.

Photos B. Meillon

benemeillon {at} gmail. com