Kwang Bai Byun graduated from the Department of French at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and earned a Ph.D. in French literature from the University of Montpellier III in France, focusing on the study of Sartre. He previously served as a professor at the Minerva College of Liberal Arts at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and currently leads Sisyphe, a research group into French humanities.

Byun has authored books including Being and Nothingness: An Existential Exploration Toward Freedom; The Second Sex: an Encyclopedia of Feminism; Reading Sartre’s ‘What Is Literature?’; Sartre and Violence: Faces of Violence in Sartre’s Philosophy and Literature; and Sartre vs. Beauvoir. He has also translated numerous works into Korean, including Roland Barthes’ The Last Lecture; A Biography of Sartre; Marcel Mauss: Father of French Anthropology; Derrida: Philosopher of Deconstruction; Sartre and Camus: Friendship and Struggle; The Opium of the Intellectuals; Sartre and Aron: Two Intellectuals of the Century; Imaginary Marxists; Being and Nothingness; and Critique of Dialectical Reason, among others.