Born in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon in 1966, William Marx attended the Lycée Thiers in Marseille before entering the École normale supérieure in 1986. After ranking first in the agrégation exam in classical literature in 1989, he defended his doctoral dissertation in 2000 at Paris-Sorbonne University and obtained his habilitation to supervise research in 2005 at Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis University. He taught in the United States and Japan as well as at several French universities before being elected in 2019 as a professor at the Collège de France in the Chair of Comparative Literatures.
A member of the Academia Europaea, a laureate of the Académie française and the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, an honorary member of the Institut universitaire de France, a laureate of the International Francqui Professor Chair, a former fellow of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, a regular guest lecturer at foreign universities, and editor of works by T. S. Eliot and Paul Valéry—including Valéry’s previously unpublished Cours de poétique —he focuses in particular on literary canons and libraries, as well as on the long-term evolution of aesthetic systems and the status of literature from antiquity to the present day, and their variation across cultures. Among his works, many of which have been published by Éditions de Minuit and translated into a dozen languages, are The Birth of Modern Criticism (2002), Farewell to Literature (2005), The Life of the Scholar (2009), The Tomb of Oedipus (2012), The Hatred of Literature (2015), A Gay Knowledge (2018), Living in the World’s Library (2020), New Stars (2021), A Summer with Don Quixote (2024), and Libraries of the Mind (2025).
