From April to June 2026, Jeffrey Drouin, Ph.D., of the University of Tulsa (Oklahoma, USA) was a guest of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities as a Georg Bollenbeck Fellow, hosted by Dr. Marcel Hartwig. On June 3, he gave a public lecture titled “Refiguring James Joyce: Archival and Editorial Practice in Modernist Life Writing”. In it he presented his work editing the previously unpublished diary of Stanislaus Joyce, the Modern novelist’s brother, and discussed how it could change the way we read James Joyce.

Drouin’s stay also reflects one of Siegen’s closest international ties, as the University of Tulsa has been a partner of the University of Siegen for more than 25 years and is one of its focus partnerships. Students from all disciplines can spend a semester or a year at the partner university, and researchers from both institutions teach and collaborate across the Atlantic.

Drouin is the Frances W. O’Hornett Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Tulsa. He edits the James Joyce Quarterly, the leading international journal of Joyce studies, and also co-directs the Modernist Journals Project, a digital archive of magazines from the Modernist period. His research focuses on transatlantic modernism, including periodicals, the avant-garde, the First World War and literature’s engagement with science. His first book, James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture, reads Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in the light of the new physics. He is currently writing a book on Gothic church architecture in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. He also serves as executive secretary of the International James Joyce Foundation.

Jeff Drouin about his stay in Siegen in his own words: “I am very grateful, not just for the research and intellectual opportunities provided by the Georg Bollenbeck Fellowship, but for the connections and friendships that made it a transformative experience. While living in Siegen, I was able to travel within Germany and to Amiens, France. However, the continual hospitality that introduced me to Siegen’s local character and to Germany’s natural beauty made it inclusive in a way that I could never have foreseen. It is my sincere hope that The University of Siegen and The University of Tulsa will continue this partnership long into the future.”

Born in 1976 in Connecticut, Drouin received his BA from Providence College in Rhode Island, his MA from the University of Virginia and his PhD from the the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. From Siegen, he travelled on to Kraków to celebrate Bloomsday on June 16 and then taught a workshop at the Trieste Joyce School, the annual summer school held in the city where Joyce lived for more than a decade.