Jean-Jacques Thomas

Jean-Jacques Thomas

Jean-Jacques Thomas is Distinguished Professor since Fall 2013 and Melodia E. Jones Endowed Chair in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures since August 2008 at the State University of New York (SUNY). At the time of appointment to the UB unit he was also appointed Associate Director of Canadian Studies for Québec Affairs and Programs and reappointed to that position in 2013.

He taught at the Université de Paris-8 (1969-1972), the University of Michigan (1972-1975), Columbia University (1975-1981) and Duke University (1981-2008) before becoming Named Professor at SUNY in 2008. From 1989 to 2005 he was the Director of the Summer Institute of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; for three years he was a Visiting Professor at UQÀM (1987-1989); in 2005 he was appointed Associate Faculty Member at the Centre d'Etudes Poétiques of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Lyon). He was a member of the COS (Comité d'Orientation Scientifique - International Expert, Humanities) for the French Universities of Aix-Marseille (Provence, Méditerranée, Paul Cézanne). He has published several books on poetics and contemporary French literature and theory : Lire Leiris: essai d'étude poétique d'un fonctionnement analinguistique (Paris : P.V. 1972); Poétique générative (Paris : Larousse 1978); Poética Générativa (Buenos Aires : Hachette1982; new and augmented edition, 1989); La Langue la poésie (Lille : Septentrion, 1989); Yves Bonnefoy: A Concordance (New York : Mellen, 1990); La Langue volée (Berne : Lang, 1990), Oulipo : chroniques des années héroïques (1978-2018) (New Orleans : Les Presses Universitaires du Nouveau Monde, 2019), Perec en Amérique (Bruxelles/Paris : Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2019). With Steven Winspur he co-authored Poeticized Language (University Park : Penn State Press, 2000). He translated into French The Semiotic Web [La Toile sémiotique] by Thomas Sebeok (Bruxelles : Degrés, 1981) and Semiotics of Poetry [Sémiotique de la poésie] by Michael Riffaterre (Paris : Seuil, 1983). He is a founding editor (2003) and until 2016 Executive Editor of the European journal Formes Poétiques Contemporaines [FPC] and since 2008 Executive Director of Formules. He is an associate editor of Poetics Today; he is a member of the editorial boards of Studies in 20th-Century Literature, SubStance, The New Centennial Review and a former member of the Advisory Editorial Committee of PMLA. He is Directeur Littéraire (Advisor for Literature) of PUNM (New Orleans). He was chair of several MLA divisional committees (1993-1998- Theoretical linguistics; 2001-2004- Politics of the Profession, 2009-2014 - Linguistic Approaches to Literature). He was a member of the Coalition Group of Foreign Languages Specialists which produced the National Standards for Foreign Languages (Project 2000). With Bernardo Schiavetta he published the issue 14 of Formules (“Forme / Informe” – 2009); with Hermes Salceda (University of Vigo, Spain) he edited the volume Le Pied de la lettre (2010); in 2012 with Camille Bloomfield (Paris-XIII, France) and Marc Lapprand (Univ. of Victoria, Canada) he edited the issue 16 of Formules (“Oulipo”); he edited the special issue of Substance 123 (“Pierre Alferi”) (2011). For 2020 he is preparing with Ewa Zierek and David Castillo a special volume entitled: Continental Theory: Buffalo Transatlantic Crossroads of a Critical Insurrection, to be published by the SUNY University Press. In recent year he organized or co-organized several colloquia: “Urbanités Littéraires – Cityscapes” (SUNY – 2009), “Le Pied de la lettre” (Universidad de Vigo, Spain, 2010); “Les Automatistes” (Albright-Knox Art Gallery – Buffalo, 2010), “Oulipo@50 - L’Oulipo à 50 ans” (SUNY – 2011), ““Buffalo: Transatlantic Crossroads of a Critical Insurrection – Continental Theory (and its Future)” (SUNY - 1018); and in 2013 he organized the American Council for Quebec Studies (ACQS) National Annual Outreach Seminar (SUNY).