Éric Athenot is professor of American literature at Université Paris-Est Créteil. He translated the first-ever French translation of Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass. After a thesis defended in 1995 on the work of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), Éric Athenot devotes most of his research to 19th century American poetry. His activities have focused for the past twenty years on Walt Whitman (1819-1892), to whom he has devoted a monograph, numerous articles and communications and whose work he translates for José Corti editions. For a few years now, he has also been interested in the work of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), which he willingly puts alongside that of Whitman. He has also published works on contemporary American fiction (Richard Powers, Mary Caponegro, Rikki Ducornet).