GPD email address: spt_gpd@yorku.ca

Jean-Thomas Tremblay (PhD, English Language and Literature, University of Chicago, 2018) is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought at York University. He holds graduate appointments in English, Film, Social & Political Thought, Science & Technology Studies, and Humanities. In 2025, Tremblay received the 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, Jean-Thomas 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 the climate crisis as a problem of language.

In his first monograph, Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022), Tremblay asks 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, puts puts ecocriticism’s protocols of entanglement and enmeshment to task through encounters with specimens of disaster, transcendental, and horror cinema that are 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,” regards ascendent ways of reading the climate, both within and beyond ecocriticism, as symptomatic of late liberalism. Occupying such contexts as diplomacy, whistleblowing, and sabotage, the book models an illiberal climate thought that would prevent the Gaia hypothesis from collapsing onto itself tautologically, with the Earth-as-world communicating to us our rightful and righteous place in the self-regulation of a superorganism’s biotic and abiotic components. Excerpts from this project have appeared or are forthcoming in Critical Inquiry 51, no. 1, Representations 169, and differences 37, no. 2.

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.

Research Interests

Current Courses

Upcoming Courses

GPD email address: spt_gpd@yorku.ca

Jean-Thomas Tremblay (PhD, English Language and Literature, University of Chicago, 2018) is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought at York University. He holds graduate appointments in English, Film, Social & Political Thought, Science & Technology Studies, and Humanities. In 2025, Tremblay received the 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, Jean-Thomas 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 the climate crisis as a problem of language.

In his first monograph, Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022), Tremblay asks 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, puts puts ecocriticism’s protocols of entanglement and enmeshment to task through encounters with specimens of disaster, transcendental, and horror cinema that are 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,” regards ascendent ways of reading the climate, both within and beyond ecocriticism, as symptomatic of late liberalism. Occupying such contexts as diplomacy, whistleblowing, and sabotage, the book models an illiberal climate thought that would prevent the Gaia hypothesis from collapsing onto itself tautologically, with the Earth-as-world communicating to us our rightful and righteous place in the self-regulation of a superorganism’s biotic and abiotic components. Excerpts from this project have appeared or are forthcoming in Critical Inquiry 51, no. 1, Representations 169, and differences 37, no. 2.

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.

Degrees

Research Interests

Current Courses

Upcoming Courses