Antoine Compagnon

Antoine Compagnon (born 1950 in Brussels, Belgium) is a Professor of French Literature at Collège de France, Paris (2006–), and the Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York.

Compagnon studied at École polytechnique (1970) and École nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (1975), and holds a Doctorate of Paris Diderot University (1985).

Compagnon was a Fellow of the Fondation Thiers (1975-1978), taught at École polytechnique (1978-1985), Institut français du Royaume-Uni, London (1980-1981), University of Rouen (1981-1985), was a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1986, 1990), Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1988), Professor at University of Maine (France), Le Mans (1989-1990), Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1994), Professor at Paris-Sorbonne University (1994-2006).

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1997) and Academia Europaea (2006), and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (2009). He received an Honorary Degree of King's College London (2010), HEC Paris (2012), and University of Liège (2013), and the Claude Lévi-Strauss Prize of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques (2011).

In 2012, Compagnon did a daily broadcast on France Inter, Un été avec Montaigne. The book became a bestseller in 2013. He did another series in 2014, Un été avec Baudelaire. In 2013, he curated a show of Proust's manuscripts from the Bibliothèque nationale de France at the Morgan Library.