Early Modern French Literature; Film and Media Studies; Intersection of Literature and Graphic Imagination

Tom Conley, Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures. Conley studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media.  Books include Film Hieroglyphs (1991, new edition 2006), The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern Writing (1992), The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (1996, new edition 2010), L’Inconscient graphique: Essai sur la lettre à la Renaissance (2000), Cartographic Cinema (2007);  An Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Early Modern France (2011) and À fleur de page: Voir et lire le texte de la Renaissance (2014).  He has published Su realismo (Valencia, 1988), a critical study of Las Hurdas (Luis Buñuel, 1932).  With T. Jefferson Kline he co-edited the Wylie-Blackwell Companion to Jean-Luc Godard (2014).  His translations include Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1988 and 1992), and the same author’s Capture of Speech (1997) and Culture in the Plural (1997); Marc Augé, In the Metro (2003) and Casablanca: Movies and Memory (2009); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993); Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map (2006); and other authors.  Among his 250 articles and book-chapters are contributions to The History of Cartography 3: The European Renaissance, Cinema and Modernity, Michael Haneke, The Epic Film, Film Analysis, Opening André Bazin, Burning Darkness:  A Half-Century of Spanish Cinema, Film, Theory and Philosophy, European Film Theory, etc. He has held visiting appointments at the University of California-Berkeley, UCLA, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, L’Ecole de Chartes, L’Ecole en Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and other institutions. In 2003 he was a seminar leader at the School for Critical Theory (Cornell). Awards include fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a member of the Modern Language Association, The International Association for the History of Cartography, the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, and the United States Handball Association. Since 2000 he and his spouse, Verena Conley, have been co-masters of Kirkland House.  In 2011-12 he was the Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at work on a project titled "Engineering, Poetry, Mapping:  Baroque Literature and Cartography in Early Modern France."  In December of 2011 the Université Blaise-Pascal (Clermont-Ferrand, France) awarded him an honorary doctorate.  In 2014 former students Bernd Renner and Phillip Usher co-edited and published a book of 30 essays, Illustrations conscientes: Mélanges en honneur de Tom Conley (Paris: Éditions Classiques Garnier).   

Major Publications:

An Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Renaissance France, 2010. 

The Sovereign Map (A translation of Christian Jacob, L'Empire des cartes) University of Chicago Press, 2006

Cartographic Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2006)

L'Insconscient graphique (Paris: PUV, 2000), a French edition of The Graphic Unconscious. 

Co-editor, The World and its Rival: Essays in Honor of Per Nykrog (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999).

The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing. Cambridge Studies in French. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Pres, 1992.

Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Co-editor of Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-Century France. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
 

Major Translations:

Translation and edition of Marc Augé, Casablanca: Movies and Memory, 2009.

Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 

Marc Augé, In the Metro, with an introduction and an afterword (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002). 

Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings. Minneappolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. With Afterword.

Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. With Afterword.

Réda Bensmaia, The Year of Passages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. With Afterword.

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz & the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. With Introduction.

Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 and 1992. With Introduction.
 

Selected Recent Articles:

“’Des cannibales’: Essai sous le don,” Montaigne Studies 22 (2010) 119-26.

“Le Métier d’écrire,” L’Homme:Revue française d’anthropologie 185-86 (January-June 2009): 333-42.

"Le Méditer: Via Apian,” Cahiers V.-L. Saulnier no. 26 (2009) 95-112.

“A Devil in Diversion: Number and Line in the Essais,” Configurations 17.1-2 (Winter 2009): 87-103.

Cahiers V.-L. Saulnier (2009).  

The Cartographic Journal (2009).

  L'Homme (2008). 

"Getting Lost on the Waterways of L'Atalante ," in Murray Pomerance, ed., Cinema and Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2006) 253-72. 

"A Writing of Space: On French Critical Theory in 1973 and its Aftermath," Diacritics 33.3-4 (2003, appearing in 2006) 189-203. 

"An Eclogue Engraved: Scève & Salomon's Saulsaye (1547)," in Adrian Armstrong and Malcolm Quainton, eds, Book & Text in France, 1400-1600 (London: Ashgate, 2006).

"The Essays and the New World," in Ullrich Langer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) 74-95. 

"Vespucci face à l'Amérique: Une scène de géographie," in: Cristina Capineri, ed., Memorie geografiche , supplement to theRevista Geografica Italiana, Conoscere il mondo: Vespucci e la modernità (Florence: Società di studi geografici, 2005) 9-22. 

"'Un chien andalou,'" in Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky, eds, Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (New York: Norton, 2005), 196-215. 

"Des Périers on Speed," The Early French 'Nouvelle' , ed. David Laguardia and Gary Ferguson, Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies (Tempe: Arizona State University, 2005) 35-58. 

"Cinema and its Discontents: Rancière & Film Theory," SubStance 34.3 (2005) 96-106. 

“A Restive Word,” Paragraph 27 (special issue on Genet, ed. Mairéad Hanrahan, 2004) 77-84. 

“A Fable of Film: Rancière’s Anthony Mann,” Sub-stance 33.1 (2004): 91-107. 

“Un tombeau de mélanges: Les “Epistres de l’amant vert” dans le livre imprimé des Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troie (1512-1513),” in Dominique de Courcelles, ed., Ouvrages miscellanées & Théories de la connaissance à la Renaissance. 

“The City Vanishes,” in Joan-Ramon Resina and dieter Ingenscheay, eds., Aftereffects of the City (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003), 209-23. 

“End-Credits,” in Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison, eds., Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science(New York: Routledge, 2003), 359-67. 

“A Matter of Figure and Fact,” afterword to Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, tr. by David Smith (Minneapolis: U of MN P, 2003), 130-49. 

“Conspiracy Crisis,” Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture & Politics 14 (2003): 47-60. 

“From Detail to Periphery: All French Literature is Francophone,” Yale French Studies 

“Film without a Future, “Cinematic 1.1 (2003), 38-40. 

Ronsard on Edge: ‘Les Amours d’Eurymédon et Callirée’ (1570),” The New Centennial Review 2.1 (2002), 33-54. 

“Montaigne moqueur: ‘Virgile’ and its Geographies of Gender,” in Kathleen Perry Long, ed., High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France (Kirksville, MO: Truman State UP, 2002), 93-106. (Paris: Ecole des Chartes, Coll. Etudes et rencontres 12, 2003), 79-101. n. 103 (“French & Francopone: the Challenge of Expanding Horizons,” ed. Farid Laroussi & Christopher Miller, 2003), 166-76.
 

Book Chapters:

“The Strategist and the Stratigrapher,” in Aftereffects: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. D. N. Rodowick (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010) 260-73. (?)

 "A Topographer’s Eye: From Gilles Corrozet to Pieter Apian,” in Walter S. Melion and Lee Palmer Wandel, eds, Early Modern Eyes (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010) 55-80.

“Louis Aragon, ’Elsa, je t’aime,’” in Hugues Azerad, ed., 20th Century French Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 105-15.

“The 39 Steps and the Mental Map of Classical Cinema,” in: Martin Dodge, ed., Rethinking Maps (London: Routledge, 2009) 131-48.

“Cinema and its Discontents,” in Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts,neds, Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009) 216-28.

“Fadaises et Dictons,” in Zahi Zalloua, ed., Montaigne after Theory/ Theory after Montaigne (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2009) 253-63.

“Sarah Kofman,” in Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, ed. Felitcy Colman (Durham: Acumen Publishers, 2009) 190-200.

European Film Theory (2008).

Mélanges Jean Céard (2008).  

Rhétorique et littérature en Europe de la fin du Moyen Age au XVIIe siècle (2008).

The History of Cartography 3: The European Renaissance (2007).

Cinema and Modernity (2007).