Jean-Thomas Tremblay

Scholar of ecology, sexuality, literature, and film

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I am an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at York University, in Toronto, where I hold graduate appointments in Humanities, Social and Political Thought, and Science and Technology 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, is scheduled for an August 2024 release 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 titled The Art of Climate Inaction. Information on these and other projects is available on my institutional profile.PUBLICATIONSMonographsBreathing 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, 2024Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, coauthored with Steven Swarbrick, Northwestern University Press (2024)
Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image series, edited by Brian PriceIn progressThe Art of Climate InactionEdited 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“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)In production“Just Sabotage,” Critical Inquiry 51, no. 1 (2024)“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 ClarkChapters 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“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"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