Jacques Neefs was named professor emeritus on July 1, 2018 in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. From 1998 to 2006, he was the Louis Marin Distinguished Visiting Professor. He has been associate professor (1980–1990) and professor (1990–2006) at the University Paris 8 and director of the research program in the new field of textual genetics at the CNRS since 1990. He has initiated several programs of teaching and research with foreign universities in Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, China, and Russia.

He belongs to the editorial board of several journals, Modern Language Notes, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Substance, Littérature, Genesis, Flaubert Revue critique et génétique, Romanistisches Jahrbuch.

Jacques Neefs’s main research interests are the links between literature and history, literature and sciences, literature and knowledge in 19th- and 20th-century French literature, theory of modernity, and genetic criticism. His current research project is about “Prose as a Modern Art, from Flaubert to Proust.” He is currently editing La Tentation de saint Antoine and Bouvard et Pécuchet, for a new edition of Flaubert’s Œuvres complètes, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, and editing a collection of articles on genetic criticism.

Jacques Neefs published numerous books and articles on Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Claude Simon, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and on genetic criticism. He gave an edition of Madame Bovary (Le Livre de Poche, 1999) and of Salammbô (Le Livre de Poche, 2011), was the co-editor of Savoirs en récits I and II (PUV 2010), and the editor of several special issues of Modern Languages Notes, on Madame Bovary (2007), on Flaubert (2010), on Salammbô and on Jean Starobinski (2013). He recently published “Written on the page” in Visible writings Culture, Forms, Readings, ed. by Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw, Rutgers University Press, 2010; Salammbô. Love, Gods, Wars, a Modern Epic Prose, Flaubert Lectures II, August Verlag, 2011; and “Flaubert et la bêtise” and “Stupeur et bêtise”, in Flaubert et l’empire de la bêtise, Anne Herschberg Pierrot ed., Éditions Cecile Defaut, 2012.