GPD email address: spt_gpd@yorku.ca

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought. He holds graduate appointments in English, Film, Social & Political Thought, Science & Technology Studies, and Humanities. Dr. Tremblay is the recipient of the 2025 Liberal Arts & Professional Studies Dean’s Award for Distinction in Research, Creativity, or Scholarship—Emerging Researcher.

Spanning literary studies (especially modern and contemporary U.S. and Anglophone prose), film studies, the environmental humanities, and sexuality studies, Tremblay’s research and teaching bring aesthetic modes of attention to conceptual and historical questions pertaining to overlapping environmental, economic, and political crises in settler and extractive societies. His current research draws on psychoanalysis and deconstruction—as they have been taken up in queer theory and Afropessimism—to consider extinction as a problem of language.

In his first monograph, Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022), Tremblay asked how to account for the interplay between subjects and their milieux without dissolving embodiment and experience into the world’s undifferentiated multiplicity. In 2023–2024, the book was cited as the main inspiration for a major Contemporary Calgary exhibition gathering artists with disabilities.

His second monograph, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (“Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image” series, Northwestern University Press, 2024), co-authored with Steven Swarbrick, put ecocriticism’s protocols of entanglement and enmeshment to task by reading specimens of disaster, transcendental, and horror cinema animated by an “apedagogical drive.” Negative Life earned the Honourable Mention for the 2025 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2025 Ecocritical Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.

Tremblay’s monograph-in-progress, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and tentatively titled “The Climate after the Fact,” proposes an immanent critique of the rhetoric of late liberalism, collecting and indicting the figures according to which destructive or outright apocalyptic ideas and actions may be said to add up to “the world.” Excerpts from this project have appeared or are forthcoming in Critical Inquiry 51, no. 1, Representations 169, and Differences 37, no. 2.

A selection of Tremblay’s publications, including the volume Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s (State University of New York Press, 2021), coedited with Andrew Strombeck, is available on his personal site: https://jeanthomastremblay.carrd.co/.

Tremblay is a member of the Advisory Board of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and a Contributing Editor to Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.

Prior to joining York, Tremblay completed a PhD in English Language and Literature with a Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago and served as an Assistant Professor of English at New Mexico State University.

Research Interests

Current Courses

GPD email address: spt_gpd@yorku.ca

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought. He holds graduate appointments in English, Film, Social & Political Thought, Science & Technology Studies, and Humanities. Dr. Tremblay is the recipient of the 2025 Liberal Arts & Professional Studies Dean’s Award for Distinction in Research, Creativity, or Scholarship—Emerging Researcher.

Spanning literary studies (especially modern and contemporary U.S. and Anglophone prose), film studies, the environmental humanities, and sexuality studies, Tremblay’s research and teaching bring aesthetic modes of attention to conceptual and historical questions pertaining to overlapping environmental, economic, and political crises in settler and extractive societies. His current research draws on psychoanalysis and deconstruction—as they have been taken up in queer theory and Afropessimism—to consider extinction as a problem of language.

In his first monograph, Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022), Tremblay asked how to account for the interplay between subjects and their milieux without dissolving embodiment and experience into the world’s undifferentiated multiplicity. In 2023–2024, the book was cited as the main inspiration for a major Contemporary Calgary exhibition gathering artists with disabilities.

His second monograph, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (“Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image” series, Northwestern University Press, 2024), co-authored with Steven Swarbrick, put ecocriticism’s protocols of entanglement and enmeshment to task by reading specimens of disaster, transcendental, and horror cinema animated by an “apedagogical drive.” Negative Life earned the Honourable Mention for the 2025 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2025 Ecocritical Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.

Tremblay’s monograph-in-progress, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and tentatively titled “The Climate after the Fact,” proposes an immanent critique of the rhetoric of late liberalism, collecting and indicting the figures according to which destructive or outright apocalyptic ideas and actions may be said to add up to “the world.” Excerpts from this project have appeared or are forthcoming in Critical Inquiry 51, no. 1, Representations 169, and Differences 37, no. 2.

A selection of Tremblay’s publications, including the volume Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s (State University of New York Press, 2021), coedited with Andrew Strombeck, is available on his personal site: https://jeanthomastremblay.carrd.co/.

Tremblay is a member of the Advisory Board of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and a Contributing Editor to Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.

Prior to joining York, Tremblay completed a PhD in English Language and Literature with a Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago and served as an Assistant Professor of English at New Mexico State University.

Degrees

Research Interests

Current Courses