Effie Rentzou is an Associate Professor of French Literature at Princeton University. Her research and teaching focus on modernism and the avant-garde, especially in their international and political dimensions, on poetics and text and image interaction.
Her first book, Littérature malgré elle: Le surréalisme et la transformation du littéraire (2010), examines the construction of literary phenomena in the production of an anti-literary movement by comparing surrealism in Greece and in France. Her recently completed second book, Concepts of the World: The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910-1940, explores the conceptualization of the “world” in the work and activities of writers and artists in the historical avant-garde movements – futurism, dada, and surrealism – during the period 1910-1940. In addition to these books, she is the co-editor of a volume of essays 1913: The Year of French Modernism (2020), which outlines modernism in France and its position on the map of global modernism.
