Lionel Ruffel is Head of Department and Professor of Comparative Literature at Université Paris 8, as well as Director of Graduate Studies in both the Literature and Creative Writing programs. He is the incumbent of a Research Chair ‘Archaeology of the Contemporary’ held at the Institut Universitaire de France. He is the founding director of the online literary journal “chaoïd”, which published fiction, poetry, theory, and web art experimentation between 2000 and 2007, and the founding director of the subsequent series “chaoïd” at Verdier. He was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Advanced Researcher to spend the academic year 2015–2016 at the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin.