Sophie Geoffroy, President of the IVLS
Sophie Geoffroy is Professor at the University of La Réunion (France). She is the founding President of the IVLS (founded in Paris, 2013). She is the founding editor of The Sibyl, A Journal of Vernon Lee Studies and of Vernon Lee Online, a Vimeo channel featuring interviews of family members and people who knew Vernon Lee or her close friends, of scholars, students and archivists. A Vernon Lee scholar, she is also a Vernon Lee translator (e.g. La Voix Maudite, Terre de Brume).
Her field of research includes textual genetics, comparative literature and translation studies with a focus on women, gender and cosmopolitan writers (Henry James, Walter Besant, Annie Besant). With Amanda Gagel, she is the editor ofthe six-volume Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935, London & New York: Routledge, “The Pickering Masters”. Volumes I (1865-1884), II (1885-1889) and III (1890-1896) have been published, the latest in December 2023: Geoffroy, Sophie (ed.) and Amanda Gagel (assoc. ed.). Transl.: Sophie Geoffroy (French-English) and Crystal Hall (Italian-English). Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935; Volume III, 1890-1896. London & New York: Routledge, “The Pickering Masters”, 2023.
Always eager to share archival documents and transmit knowledge, she has recently turned to Digital Humanities: her latest creation (and work in progress) is the digital library and participative database Holographical-Lee (HoL)-Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) : Letters, notebooks and manuscripts – hosted on the platform eMAN supported by ITEM-THALIM-CNRS-ENS.
Email: geoffroysophie974@gmail.com
Michel Prum, Vice-President of the IVLS
Michel Prum is Professor Emeritus at Paris Cité University. He has been Vice-President of the IVLS since its foundation in 2013 and has represented the Society inside Paris Cité, where the IVLS is officially registered. His field of research is the history of thought in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, especially early Socialism and Darwinism, as well as translation studies. He contributed a paper on J.H. Huxley and Vernon Lee to the IVLS Conference on The Future of Intelligence in Florence in 2023.
Email: prum.michel@wanadoo.fr
Shafquat Towheed, Vice-President of the IVLS
Shafquat Towheed is a founding member of the International Vernon Lee Society (2014) and is currently a Vice-President of the IVLS. He is a Senior Lecturer in English in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), The Open University (UK). He is also Vice-President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). He has written extensively on Vernon Lee, with articles published in Victorian Studies, The Yearbook of English Studiesand Nineteenth-Century Literature. He has a chapter forthcoming in Elisa Bizzotto and Sally Blackburn-Daniels (eds) Vernon Lee: Place, Nation, Memory, (Ohio University Press, forthcoming 2024). Towheed has considerable expertise in 19th and 20th century British and American literature, with a particular focus on the history of reading, and in scholarly editing. He is one of the editors of the Collected Works of Edith Wharton for Oxford University Press. Together with Blackburn-Daniels, he was one of the co-organisers of the Future of Intelligence: A Multidisciplinary Vernon Lee Conference (Florence, Italy, 8-10 September 2023).
Email: Shafquat.Towheed@open.ac.uk
Sally Blackburn-Daniels, Vice-President of the IVLS
Sally Blackburn-Daniels became Vice-President of the IVLS in 2023, after serving as Communications Officer for the society from 2016. Sally is a Research Fellow at Teesside University, where their scholarship focuses on Vernon Lee, performance and pacifism, and digital humanities approaches to late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature. They have recently published a chapter on Vernon Lee in Oxford Handbook of American and British Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers, ed. Alison Stone and Lydia Moland (Oxford University Press), and have co-edited special issues of Voluptè: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies on Vernon Lee with Professor Patricia Pulham (Surrey), and a special issue of English Studies with Edmund King (Open University) titled ‘Bookshelves, Social Media and Gaming’.
Email: s.blackburn-daniels@tees.ac.uk
Gilles Pasquet, Treasurer of the IVLS
Gilles Pasquet, membre fondateur de l’International Vernon Lee Society, est trésorier de l’Association depuis sa création en 2013.
Médecin généraliste, Spécialiste de Médecine du Sport, il a publié L’échauffement du sportif ou Comment préparer l’organisme à un effort : anatomie, physiologie, psychologie, sophrologie, plus de 200 exercices de musculation et étirement (Paris, Amphora sports, 2004).
Spécialiste de la Réparation Juridique des Dommages Corporels (en tant que médecin de recours), Psychothérapeute, en certification d’Analyse Bio-Energétique, il est membre fondateur et Vice-Président du Collège de Sophrologie de l’Océan Indien (CSOI), où il enseigne la Sophrologie.
Par ailleurs chercheur de trésors enfouis et chercheur en cryptographie, il a livré sa méthode de recherche dans « L’Arcane dévoilé : une méthode originale de lecture des documents relatifs aux trésors enfouis aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles » dans Danièle Berton-Charrère, Sophie Jorrand, Monique Venuat (dir.), Témoigner : flibuste, piraterie et autres courses de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Clermont-Ferrand, Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2015).
Auteur de théâtre et de poésie, amoureux de littérature et de philosophie, Gilles Pasquet est le découvreur des lettres, manuscrits, carnets de Vernon Lee dans le grenier des peintres Berthe et André Noufflard à Fresnay-le-Long (Normandie) en 2012. Il est le réalisateur de bon nombre des vidéos consacrées à Vernon Lee et à la recherche leeienne sur la chaîne Vimeo « Vernon Lee Online ».
Gilles Pasquet, founding member of the International Vernon Lee Society, has been treasurer of the Association since its inception in 2013. Gilles is a general practitioner, Specialist in Sports Medicine, he published The warm-up of the athlete or How to prepare the body for an effort: anatomy, physiology, psychology, sophrology, more than 200 bodybuilding and stretching exercises (Paris: Amphora sports, 2004).
Specialist in Legal Reparation of Bodily Injury (as victim support), Psychotherapist, in Bio-Energetic Analysis certification, he is the founding Vice-President of the Indian Ocean Sophrology College (CSOI), where he teaches Sophrology.
In addition, as a cryptography researcher and treasure hunter, he has published his research method in « L’Arcane unveiled: an original method of reading documents relating to buried treasures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries » in Danièle Berton-Charrère, Sophie Jorrand, Monique Venuat (eds.), Testifying: buccaneers, pirates and other filibusters from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2015).
Playwright and poet, lover of literature and philosophy, Gilles Pasquet is the discoverer of autograph letters, manuscripts, notebooks by Vernon Lee in the attic of French painters Berthe and André Noufflard in Fresnay-le-Long (Normandy) in 2012. He is the film director of many of the videos dedicated to Vernon Lee and Leeian research on the Vimeo channel «Vernon Lee Online».
Mary F. Burns, American Liaison for the IVLS
Mary F. Burns writes historical fiction, including an historical mystery series featuring Vernon Lee (as Violet Paget) and John Singer Sargent as a different kind of Holmes & Watson (she’s Holmes!). As an independent scholar, Mary has focused her studies, writing and conference papers on Vernon Lee, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. Learn more about her at www.maryfburns.com. Mary lives in San Francisco with her husband.
Email: maryfburns9@gmail.com.
Suzy Corrigan, Secretary and Communications Officer for the IVLS
Suzy Corrigan is a first year PhD student at Teesside University and in the early stages of her research. She is interested primarily in music and cosmopolitanism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth century women’s writing, particularly Vernon Lee. As a mature student, Suzy has recently returned to academia after a successful career in performing arts, where her theatrical experience provided her with an insight into the act of musical performance.
Email: S.Corrigan@tees.ac.uk
Frankie Dytor, Secretary and Communications Officer for the IVLS
Frankie Dytor is secretary and communications officer for IVLS. They are a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English at the University of Exeter, where they are working on a project provisionally entitled ‘Aestheticism, Sexology, and the Making of Trans Feeling, 1870-1930’. Frankie completed an AHRC-funded PhD in History of Art from the University of Cambridge and is currently turning this work into a book tentatively entitled Renaissance Resurgent: Aestheticism and the Pursuit of the Living Past. They have written on Vernon Lee for the Journal of Victorian Culture as well as public platforms such as Sound and Music.
Email: f.dytor@exeter.ac.uk
