Jean-Thomas Tremblay

Scholar of ecology, sexuality, literature, and film

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_{Poster design by Austin Svedjan}

INTERVIEWS AROUND NEGATIVE LIFE: THE CINEMA OF EXTINCTIONASLE EcoCast, with Lindsay Jolivette and Alex Tischer (November 29, 2024)
LinkNew Books in Film, New Books Network, with Jules O'Dwyer (November 23, 2024)
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EVENTS AROUND NEGATIVE LIFE: THE CINEMA OF EXTINCTIONAutumn 2024October 11, 5 pm – 7 pm
Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto
Conversation around Negative Life with Brian Price, editor of the Superimpositions series
Link
RecordingOctober 18, 1 pm – 2:30 pm
ASAP Conference, New York City
“Negativity is Not a Luxury” panel around Negative Life with Elizabeth Wilson, Rahul Sen, and Kartik Nair
LinkOctober 29, 4 pm – 5 pm,
Gen/Sex Working Group, University of Pennsylvania
"The Queer Impossibility of First Reformed" talk and conversation around Negative Life
LinkOctober 30, 12:30 pm – 2 pm
Colloquium in Visual Culture, Bryn Mawr College
“First Cow at the End of the World” talk
LinkNovember 15, 3 pm – 5 pm
Department of Rhetoric and Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, UC Berkeley
“The Cinema of Negative Ecology” symposium with Rizvana Bradley, Iggy Cortez, Patrice Douglass, Debarati Sanyal, Mario Telò, and Damon Young
LinkWinter 2025January 16, 4:30 pm – 6 pm / January 17, 11 am – 1 pm
Art History & Communications Speaker Series, Sex in Theory Working Group
McGill University
"First Cow at the End of the World" talk and "Negative Life and Its Afterlives" workshop
LinkFebruary 26–28
Cinema and Extinction Conference
University of Indiana at Bloomington
Keynote lecture and film screening
LinkAdditional event at the University of Cambridge to be announced at a later date.

_{Poster design by Bobby Benedicto}

I am an Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and the Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University, in Toronto.I hold graduate appointments in Humanities, English, Social and Political Thought, Science and Technology Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies. My interdisciplinary research and teaching concentrate on the overlapping environmental, economic, and political crises of the 1970s to the present while recovering the longer histories of nature writing and the life sciences.My scholarship carries two primary objectives: the first is to account for the interplay between a body and its milieu without dissolving embodiment and experience into the world’s undifferentiated multiplicity; the second is to reassess the role that ecocriticism, or ecological aesthetic criticism, can expect the aesthetic to play in socialization and politicization.My first monograph, Breathing Aesthetics, was published by Duke University Press in 2022. Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, coauthored with Steven Swabrick, appeared in 2024 in Northwestern University Press's "Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image" series. I'm currently working on the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded project "Eco-subtraction: Downsizing the Environmental Humanities," which will culminate in a new monograph tentatively titled To Mean the World. Information on these and other projects is available on my institutional profile.PUBLICATIONSMonographsNegative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, coauthored with Steven Swarbrick, Northwestern University Press (2024)
Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image series, edited by Brian Price
Reviewed in Cultural GeographiesBreathing Aesthetics, Duke University Press (2022)
Reviewed in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Visual Studies, ASAP/Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, E3W Review of Books
Cited by curator Amanda Cachia as the inspiration behind the exhibition Resistance and Respiration, presented at Contemporary Calgary from November 30, 2023, to April 14, 2024In progressTo Mean the World: Climate Action and Liberal CatastropheEdited book and journal issueAvant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s, coedited with Andrew Strombeck, State University of New York Press (2021)Breath: Image and Sound, special issue of New Review of Film and Television Studies 16, no 2 (2018)Articles in refereed journals“Just Sabotage,” Critical Inquiry 51, no. 1 (2024): 90–113“Sex in Nature: Darwin, Dedramatized,” coauthored with Jules Gill-Peterson, Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture 1, no. 1 (2024)
Special issue: Nature Fights Back, edited by E. L. McCallum and Cameron Clark“Homeostasis and Extinction: Ted Chiang’s ‘Exhalation,’” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 52, no. 1 (2023): 22–29
Special issue: Breathe, edited by David F. Bell, Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Paul A. Harris, and Éric Méchoulan“Black Ecologies (Humanity, Animality, Property),” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 29, no. 1 (2023): 129–139“Diagnostic Spectatorship: Modern Physical Culture and White Masculinity,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 6, no. 2 (2021)
Special issue: Modernism and Diagnosis, edited by Lisa Mendelman and Heather A. Love“Destructive Environmentalism: The Queer Impossibility of First Reformed,” coauthored with Steven Swarbrick, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 43, no. 1 (2021): 3–30“Feminist Breathing,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 30, no. 3 (2019): 92–117
Special issue: –30–: The End of the Story, edited by Elizabeth Weed and Ellen Rooney“Aesthetic Self-Medication: Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose’s Structures of Breathing,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 28, no. 3 (2018): 221–238“Breath: Image and Sound, an Introduction,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 16, no. 2 (2018): 93–97“An Aesthetics and Ethics of Emergence, or Thinking with Luce Irigaray’s Interval of Difference,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 59, no. 2 (2017): 279–299“Room for Critique: The Spaces of Institutional Disillusionment of 1970s U.S. Feminist Fiction,” Post45 Peer-Reviewed (2016)Chapters in books“Skunk: Olfactory Violence and Morbid Speculation,” coauthored with Hsuan L. Hsu and Aleesa Cohene, Law and the Senses: Smell, edited by Caterine Nirta, Danilo Mandic, Andrea Pavoni, and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, University of Westminster Press (2023)“Afterword: On Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Untitled,” Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s, State University of New York Press (2021): 233–240“Introduction: Avant-Gardes in Crisis,” coauthored with Andrew Strombeck, Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s, State University of New York Press (2021): 1–22Reviews in refereed journals"Black Thought’s Mise en Abyme," New Formations, no, 112 (2024): 172–174“Dying Ecofeminism,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 10, no. 2 (2023), 189–194“Mediation, Immediacy, In Medias Res,” preface to the issue “Inhale/Exhale,” Venti: Air, Aesthetics, Experience 2, no. 1 (2021)“Julie Beth Napolin, The Fact of Resonance,” Modernism/modernity 28, no. 2 (2021): 290–292Review essay on the de-idealization of gender and sexuality as objects of inquiry in recent queer and trans studies scholarship, American Literature 92, no. 4 (2020): 817–820“Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 3 (2019): 232–234“Institutions of Redress and the Management of Desire,” Australian Humanities Review 63 (2018)“Waltz with Manning,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 25, no. 1 (2015): 103–106Public scholarship"Ecocriticism against The Wall," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2024)"Basically the Same: Todd Haynes's May December," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2023)“The Haynes Code,” Los Angeles Review of Books (2022)Contribution to the forum “On Lauren Berlant,” n+1 (2021)“Together, in the First Person,” Chicago Review (2020)“On Queer Ecopoetics and the Natures We Cannot Disavow,” Dispatches from the Poetry Wars (2020)
Reprinted in Poetics for the More-than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary, edited by Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbach, and Sarah Nolan, Spuyten Duyvil (2020): 480–482As coeditor, with Rebekah Sheldon, essay cluster on Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child, The Rambling (2019)“Poetics of Gender Self-Determination,” The Rambling (2019)“Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry,” Full Stop (2019)“The Aesthetic is Back; It Never Left,” Los Angeles Review of Books (2018)“No More Nature: On Ecopoetics in the Anthropocene,” Los Angeles Review of Books (2018)“Renee Gladman, Houses of Ravicka and Prose Architectures,” Chicago Review (2018): 193–196“Stories of New Narrative,” Los Angeles Review of Books (2017)“Indeterminacy and the Work of Critics,” V21 Collective (2017)“Being Black and Breathing: On Blackpentecostal Breath,” Los Angeles Review of Books (2016)“Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women,” Make Magazine (2016)“How Sia Kept Breathing and Became a Formalist,” PopMatters (2016)“Mortality Will Be Sexy,” Review 31 (2016)“Elizabeth A. Wilson, Gut Feminism,” Make Magazine (2016)“I’m Just Normal,” Arcade (2015)“After the Fall,” The Oxonian Review (2014)“Toxic Literature,” Public Books (2014)InterviewsQ&A, Duke University Press Blog (2022)Feature, The Black Agenda Report Book Forum (2022)Creative writing“Breath/Measure/Commons,” Tripwire 16 (2020): 38–46.
Based on an audio workshop commissioned by the series Heavy Breathing