Born in 1973, Marielle Macé enrolled at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1993, then obtaining a higher-education certification in French language and literature three years later. After a PhD thesis on "L’essai littéraire en France au XXe siècle” (“The literary essay in France in the twentieth century”), defended at the Paris IV University in 2002, she joined the Centre for Research on the Arts and Language, of which she soon became Deputy Director.

She teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and is a co-founder of Fabula, a website which has been dedicated for over fifteen years to research on literature, whose scientific responsibility she oversees.

After looking at the essay genre (The Time of the Essay (“Le Temps de l’essai”), 2006) and the experience of the modern reader (Ways of Reading, Ways of Being (“Façons de lire, manières d’être”), 2011), Marielle Macé’s work began to focus on style (Styles. Critique of our ways of life (“Styles. Critique de nos formes de vie”), 2016) and has led to a renewal of the concept. Because, for Marielle Macé, style goes far beyond the scope of literature to shed light on the “how” of our individual and collective actions: the author studies our lifestyles, and invites tolerance by refusing the idea that one way of being should prevail over another. In her opinion, the interest of style lies rather in its singularity.

More recently, Marielle Macé chose, in Shocking, Considering (“Sidérer, considerer”) (2017), to use literature’s resources as a way of questioning our views on migrants and refugees: how can we accurately describe these abused lives that shock us and how can we rightly move from shock to consideration?

An internationally-respected researcher, Marielle Macé is now an associate lecturer at the University of New York, and also regularly works in Europe. Her work always leaves the door open to a multidisciplinary and international dialogue, where literature and social sciences meet.

Ways of reading, Ways of Being (2011), wherein the researcher studies the impact of everyday reading on the building of our personal identity and our relationship with the world, has been translated into Italian, Chinese, Romanian and partially into English.