Michel Delville gained his degree in Germanic languages (English and German) at the University of Liège in 1989. After spending a couple of years at the University of Illinois, in the United States, as a Teaching Assistant and Visiting Scholar, he returned to Liège to complete his doctorate, awarded in 1996 with the highest possible grade and the congratulations of the jury for his thesis Writing at the Boundaries: The Contemporary Prose Poem in English.

He began his teaching career as a lecturer at the University of Liège in 1998, at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, before becoming a full professor in 2007 at the transformed Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. His primary research and teaching fields are interdisciplinary and comparative studies, contemporary poetry and poetics, American literature, avant-gardes in all their literary, pictorial and musical forms, science fiction and the fantastic (including representations of Utopia and Dystopia), and theories of literary genres.

His innovative and multi-disciplinary work has gained the recognition of his peers and earned him a number of prizes, including, in 1998, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Studies Book Award, granted to an outstanding work of scholarship in the field of literary criticism, theory, or history, and the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award (American Library Association, Chicago, U.S.A.).

He is also President of the Société Belge de Littérature Générale et Comparée and director of CIPA (Centre Interdisciplinaire de Poétique Appliquée), which he himself set up at the University of Liège in 200. This interdisciplinary centre for applied poetics has its own online electronic journal, called ‘Interval(le)s’.

Given his cross-disciplinary interests it should be of no surprise that Michel Delville is also an accomplished and successful musician. He has been playing and composing music since the mid-eighties, collaborating with many jazz musicians including Elton Dean, Harry Beckett, Alex Maguire and Annie Whitehead. His most recently formed modern jazz band, the Wrong Object, has performed in clubs and theatres on a regular basis for the last six years.

Selection of publications

DELVILLE M., Food, Poetry and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde, Routledge, 2008.

NORRIS A., DELVILLE M., Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism, Cambridge, Salt Publishing, 2005.

MICHEL P. , DELVILLE M., Hamlet & Co, Editions de l'Univeristé de Liège, 2002.

DELVILLE M., The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1998.

DELVILLE M., J. G. Ballard, Plymouth, Northcote House/The British Council, 1998.