Jürgen Ritte, who was born in 1956 in Cologne, is currently director of the Institut d’Allemand d’Asnières, at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III. He studied German language and literature, Romance languages and literatures, as well as art history in Cologne, Clermont-Ferrand, Brussels (ULB), and Paris IV.

Ritte co-founded the German Marcel Proust Society (MPG), and has been a member of its academic advisory board since 1988. He was also elected to the board of ATLAS, the French translators’ association, on which he sat from 1999 to 2003. He has been director of the postgraduate study course ‘DESS de journalisme européen’ at the Sorbonne Nouvelle since 1999 and director of the ‘Etudes franco-allemandes’ at the Sorbonne Nouvelle since 2001/2002.

Jürgen Ritte is an author and translator, and contributes to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

He has published a study on Georges Perec (Das Sprachspiel der Moderne / 1992) and supervised the series OULIPO & Co (Edition Plasma, Berlin) with German translations of Bénabou, Mathews, Perec, and Roubaud.