The staff of the James Joyce Quarterly are saddened to learn of the passing of Claude Jacquet.
Claude Jacquet was a Professor of English at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, and helped found the Joyce program at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM). She was one of the first Joyce scholars to study the Finnegans Wake notebooks and edited multiple essay collections on Joyce. One of her books, Joyce et Rabelais. Aspects de la création verbale dans Finnegans Wake (1970) is accessible online here.
In addition to her own groundbreaking research, Jacquet will be remembered for her work in fostering a worldwide community of Joycean scholarship. For the past twenty years, Jacquet organized near-yearly Joyce conferences in Paris that brought together both early-career researchers and well-established Joyce scholars, and the seminars Jacquet began around 40 years ago to decipher the Wake notebooks continue to this day.
Joyce scholars from around the world have benefited from Jacquet’s generosity, welcoming hospitality, and the rigorous body of work she contributed to make the Joyce community a more vibrant place.