Valérie Leyh is an Assistant Professor of German literature at the University of Namur and the Erasmus coordinator for the Faculty of Arts. Her research focuses on literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, with a particular interest in the poetics of rumours, women authors and their literary networks, cultural transfers and the materiality of literature.

As a F.R.S.-FNRS doctoral fellow (2011-2015), she presented a PhD devoted to rumours as a narrative technique. The work was published under the title Geräusch, Gerücht, Gerede. Formen und Funktionen der Fama in Erzähltexten Theodor Storms und Arthur Schnitzlers (Erich Schmidt, 2016). Since becoming a postdoctoral researcher of the F.R.S.-FNRS (2015-2017), she has also focused her research on eighteenth-century literature and in particular on the writings of women authors. As part of this research, she has co-edited a collective volume on Elisa von der Recke as well as a thematic issue of the journal Cahiers d'Etudes Germaniques on the European reception of moral fictions.

Through the course she teaches on the role of books in digital culture, she regularly collaborates with the Moretus Plantin University Library and is involved in the project about the collection of editions printed by Christophe Plantin.

• Literature of German realism and Austrian modernism
• Eighteenth-century literature and culture
• Narratology and the poetics of rumours
• Literary networks, epistolary and autobiographical writing
• Cultural transfers (particularly Franco-German)