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, Social & Political Thought, Science & Technology Studies, and Humanities.

Spanning literary studies, film studies, the environmental humanities, and sexuality studies, Tremblay’s research and teaching bring aesthetic modes of attention to conceptual and historical problems pertaining to overlapping environmental, economic, and political crises in settler and extractive societies. One question animating his inquiry, on display in his first monograph, Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022), has to do with how to account for the interplay between subjects and their milieux without dissolving embodiment and experience into the world’s undifferentiated multiplicity. Breathing Aesthetics diagnoses a “crisis in breathing” marked by the air’s exacerbated pollution (from endemic allergies to photochemical smog), weaponization (the adoption by militarized police of chemical devices banned in warfare), and monetization (the enclosure of breathing space and the growth of the “breathfulness industry”) since the 1970s. Tremblay contends that breathing has emerged as a medium that renders embodiment and experience as effects of biopolitical and necropolitical forces—forces that optimize certain lives and trivialize or attack others. Chapters covering literary, screen, and performance cultures find in respiratory works historically and culturally situated tactics and strategies for navigating precarious and injurious environments. In 2023–2024, the book was cited as the main inspiration for a major Contemporary Calgary exhibition gathering artists with disabilities.

In Breathing Aesthetics and, more vigorously and extensively, in his recent and current research, Tremblay also asks how the environmental humanities configure social and political life, and what role the field expects aesthetic objects, especially the narrative arts, to play in this life. Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, (“Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image” series, Northwestern University Press, 2024), a monograph coauthored with Steven Swarbrick and nominated for the 2025 Ecocritical Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, quarrels with an ethics of relation that ecocriticsm often expresses as a faith in “entanglement” or “enmeshment.” The titular concept, negative life, names the formalization and materialization by film of life’s heightened contradictions amid the sixth mass species extinction. Encounters with negative life are precipitated by specimens of disaster, eco-horror, and transcendental cinema whose deflagrated pastorals prohibit characters and spectators from accessing a horizon of harmonious coliving. These films locate in encounters with the natural world not the plenitude of interspecies wisdom but a gap in signification or, in the book’s psychoanalytic idiom, an “apedagogical drive.”

To read literature or film against ecocriticism’s customary pedagogical schemes is not to free oneself, nihilistically, from the pressures of learning anything; it is instead to take seriously the duty of learning what one does not already know. In an ongoing solo project fund-ed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that will culminate in a monograph tentatively titled “The Climate after the Fact,” Tremblay contends with the reduction of “stories” to the task of “raising awareness” or “conscious-ness” by both present-day environmentalism and the environmental humanities. The eco-citizen produced by such an aesthetic education achieves legibility within a liberal-humanist framework whose operation as a regime of violence and exclusion has been crucially exposed by Black and feminist critics of sentimentality. “The Climate after the Fact” carries two aims, both of which rely on a betrayal of content by form in the cases Tremblay assembles. The first is to untether “climate action” from a late-liberal edict of sense- or meaning-making. The second is to synthesize a critical genealogy that—from post-Kantian thought to deconstruction, to Afropessimism—resists an imperative to endorse the “given world” and its expansionist, colonial and imperial status quo. In “Just Sabotage,” an excerpt from this project published in Critical Inquiry, Tremblay argues that Nell Zink’s and Benedikt Erlingsson’s absurdist comedies on the page and the screen align political efficacy with epistemic collapse. Another excerpt, this one printed in Representations, turns to melodramas of toxic contamination, including those of Henrik Ibsen and Todd Haynes, to come to terms with the (logical rather than probabilistic) impossibility of managing aquatic contamination through capitalist and legal means of regulation and redress.

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

Upcoming Courses

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, Social & Political Thought, Science & Technology Studies, and Humanities.

Spanning literary studies, film studies, the environmental humanities, and sexuality studies, Tremblay’s research and teaching bring aesthetic modes of attention to conceptual and historical problems pertaining to overlapping environmental, economic, and political crises in settler and extractive societies. One question animating his inquiry, on display in his first monograph, Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022), has to do with how to account for the interplay between subjects and their milieux without dissolving embodiment and experience into the world’s undifferentiated multiplicity. Breathing Aesthetics diagnoses a “crisis in breathing” marked by the air’s exacerbated pollution (from endemic allergies to photochemical smog), weaponization (the adoption by militarized police of chemical devices banned in warfare), and monetization (the enclosure of breathing space and the growth of the “breathfulness industry”) since the 1970s. Tremblay contends that breathing has emerged as a medium that renders embodiment and experience as effects of biopolitical and necropolitical forces—forces that optimize certain lives and trivialize or attack others. Chapters covering literary, screen, and performance cultures find in respiratory works historically and culturally situated tactics and strategies for navigating precarious and injurious environments. In 2023–2024, the book was cited as the main inspiration for a major Contemporary Calgary exhibition gathering artists with disabilities.

In Breathing Aesthetics and, more vigorously and extensively, in his recent and current research, Tremblay also asks how the environmental humanities configure social and political life, and what role the field expects aesthetic objects, especially the narrative arts, to play in this life. Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, (“Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image” series, Northwestern University Press, 2024), a monograph coauthored with Steven Swarbrick and nominated for the 2025 Ecocritical Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, quarrels with an ethics of relation that ecocriticsm often expresses as a faith in “entanglement” or “enmeshment.” The titular concept, negative life, names the formalization and materialization by film of life’s heightened contradictions amid the sixth mass species extinction. Encounters with negative life are precipitated by specimens of disaster, eco-horror, and transcendental cinema whose deflagrated pastorals prohibit characters and spectators from accessing a horizon of harmonious coliving. These films locate in encounters with the natural world not the plenitude of interspecies wisdom but a gap in signification or, in the book’s psychoanalytic idiom, an “apedagogical drive.”

To read literature or film against ecocriticism’s customary pedagogical schemes is not to free oneself, nihilistically, from the pressures of learning anything; it is instead to take seriously the duty of learning what one does not already know. In an ongoing solo project fund-ed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that will culminate in a monograph tentatively titled “The Climate after the Fact,” Tremblay contends with the reduction of “stories” to the task of “raising awareness” or “conscious-ness” by both present-day environmentalism and the environmental humanities. The eco-citizen produced by such an aesthetic education achieves legibility within a liberal-humanist framework whose operation as a regime of violence and exclusion has been crucially exposed by Black and feminist critics of sentimentality. “The Climate after the Fact” carries two aims, both of which rely on a betrayal of content by form in the cases Tremblay assembles. The first is to untether “climate action” from a late-liberal edict of sense- or meaning-making. The second is to synthesize a critical genealogy that—from post-Kantian thought to deconstruction, to Afropessimism—resists an imperative to endorse the “given world” and its expansionist, colonial and imperial status quo. In “Just Sabotage,” an excerpt from this project published in Critical Inquiry, Tremblay argues that Nell Zink’s and Benedikt Erlingsson’s absurdist comedies on the page and the screen align political efficacy with epistemic collapse. Another excerpt, this one printed in Representations, turns to melodramas of toxic contamination, including those of Henrik Ibsen and Todd Haynes, to come to terms with the (logical rather than probabilistic) impossibility of managing aquatic contamination through capitalist and legal means of regulation and redress.

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

Upcoming Courses