Marta Caraion is a professor of French literature at the University of Lausanne. She was born in Bucharest under the Ceaușescu regime, which her family fled in 1981 when she was 14, seeking political asylum in Switzerland. Géographie des ténèbres. Bucarest - Transnistrie - Odessa, 1941-1981 [Geography of Darkness. Bucharest – Transnistria – Odessa, 1941–1981] (Fayard) is an intimate and well-documented account of family history situated within the collective history of the Romanian Holocaust. She continued her work by studying family files in the archives of the political police in Romania between 1942 and 1987. Her academic research focuses on literary representations of material culture: Comment la littérature pense les objets. Théorie littéraire de la culture matérielle [How Literature Thinks Objects: Literary Theory of Material Culture] (Champ Vallon, 2020); and, in 2025, the collective volume co-edited with J. Lyon-Caen and S.-V. Borloz: Écrire les choses. Littérature et culture matérielle 1830-2020 [Writing Things: Literature and Material Culture 1830–2020] (Champ Vallon). She continues to reflect on writing about precarious or expropriated material life in “dispossession” narratives. She is also interested in the relationship between literature and photography: Pour fixer la trace. Photographie, littérature et voyage au milieu du XIX siècle [To Fix the Trace: Photography, Literature, and Travel in the Mid-19th Century] (Droz, 2003); and the exhibition Photolittérature (XIX–XXI siècles) [Photoliterature (19th–21st Centuries)] at the Jan Michalski Foundation (2016, with Natalia Granero and J.-P. Montier).