I am an Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and the Director of the Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought. I hold graduate appointments in Humanities, English, Social & Political Thought, Science & Technology Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies.

My interdisciplinary research and teaching span the environmental humanities, sexuality studies, literary studies, and film studies, and concentrate on the overlapping environmental, economic, and political crises of the 1970s to the present while recovering the longer histories of nature writing and the life sciences. My scholarship carries two primary objectives: the first is to account for the interplay between a body and its milieu without dissolving embodiment and experience into the world’s undifferentiated multiplicity; the second is to reassess what role ecocriticism, or ecological aesthetic criticism, can expect the aesthetic to play in socialization and politicization.

My first monograph, Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022), investigates aesthetic responses to a “crisis in breathing” marked by the intensified pollution, weaponization, and monetization of the air. Breathing Aesthetics contends that breathing has emerged as a medium that configures embodiment and experience as effects of biopolitical and necropolitical forces—forces that optimize certain lives and trivialize or attack others. Chapters that span literary, screen, performance, and visual cultures find in the respiratory works of minoritized individuals historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity. I write in Breathing Aesthetics that “we should not overestimate the capacity of readers or spectators exposed to the inextricability of vitality and morbidity relayed by the aesthetics of breathing to step out into the world and transform it through sheer force of will. … I [therefore] consider awareness and consciousness from a technical standpoint (witnessing someone’s labored breathing makes me aware or conscious of mine) without sublimating them into civic or moral positions.”

My second monograph, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024), co-authored with Steven Swarbrick, expands an interrogation of the pedagogical and moral duty with which ecocritics, and environmental humanists more broadly, often entrust representations of nature. The third title in the Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image series, edited by Brian Price, Negative Life inquires into the formalization and materialization by film of life’s heightened paradoxes amid the sixth mass species extinction. Encounters with negative life as a structural condition of thought are precipitated by specimens of disaster cinema, ecohorror, and transcendental cinema whose deflagrated pastorals prohibit characters and spectators from accessing the ethical horizon of “entanglement” or “enmeshment” that ecocritics often take for granted. These films locate in encounters with the natural world not the plenitude of interspecies wisdom but a gap in signification and coherence that the book describes as an “apedagogical” drive.

My current solo book project, tentatively titled To Mean the World, seeks to detach environmentalism from a liberal project of sense-making that, in endorsing the “given” world, furthers a reproductive and expansionist status quo. This project is partly funded by the SSHRC Insight Development Grant "Eco-accretion: Downsizing the Environmental Humanities." The first excerpt from To Mean the World, “Just Sabotage,” was printed in the Fall 2024 issue of Critical Inquiry. The second, “Enemies of the People,” will appear in the Winter 2025 issue of Representations. The former examines absurdist comedies and argues that the sabotage of energy infrastructures cannot “make sense,” for it poses a necessary threat to coherence, removing without replacing the material and discursive conditions that grant the climate movement its meaning and purpose within late capitalism and late liberalism. The latter turns to melodramas of toxic contamination in order to consider the case of whistleblowing, a journalistic and legal means of condemnation and redress that maintains its symbolic integrity as an “environmental action” in the non-event of its deferral, while it still carries the brittle promise that the right datum, communicated the right way, suffices to “change the world.” I am now researching and writing chapters on prosopopoeia and nuclear apocalypse as well as parataxis and natality.

A full, hyperlinked list of my 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 my personal site: https://jeanthomastremblay.carrd.co/.

Prior to working at York, I 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

Upcoming Courses

I am an Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and the Director of the Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought. I hold graduate appointments in Humanities, English, Social & Political Thought, Science & Technology Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies.

My interdisciplinary research and teaching span the environmental humanities, sexuality studies, literary studies, and film studies, and concentrate on the overlapping environmental, economic, and political crises of the 1970s to the present while recovering the longer histories of nature writing and the life sciences. My scholarship carries two primary objectives: the first is to account for the interplay between a body and its milieu without dissolving embodiment and experience into the world’s undifferentiated multiplicity; the second is to reassess what role ecocriticism, or ecological aesthetic criticism, can expect the aesthetic to play in socialization and politicization.

My first monograph, Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022), investigates aesthetic responses to a “crisis in breathing” marked by the intensified pollution, weaponization, and monetization of the air. Breathing Aesthetics contends that breathing has emerged as a medium that configures embodiment and experience as effects of biopolitical and necropolitical forces—forces that optimize certain lives and trivialize or attack others. Chapters that span literary, screen, performance, and visual cultures find in the respiratory works of minoritized individuals historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity. I write in Breathing Aesthetics that “we should not overestimate the capacity of readers or spectators exposed to the inextricability of vitality and morbidity relayed by the aesthetics of breathing to step out into the world and transform it through sheer force of will. … I [therefore] consider awareness and consciousness from a technical standpoint (witnessing someone’s labored breathing makes me aware or conscious of mine) without sublimating them into civic or moral positions.”

My second monograph, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024), co-authored with Steven Swarbrick, expands an interrogation of the pedagogical and moral duty with which ecocritics, and environmental humanists more broadly, often entrust representations of nature. The third title in the Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image series, edited by Brian Price, Negative Life inquires into the formalization and materialization by film of life’s heightened paradoxes amid the sixth mass species extinction. Encounters with negative life as a structural condition of thought are precipitated by specimens of disaster cinema, ecohorror, and transcendental cinema whose deflagrated pastorals prohibit characters and spectators from accessing the ethical horizon of “entanglement” or “enmeshment” that ecocritics often take for granted. These films locate in encounters with the natural world not the plenitude of interspecies wisdom but a gap in signification and coherence that the book describes as an “apedagogical” drive.

My current solo book project, tentatively titled To Mean the World, seeks to detach environmentalism from a liberal project of sense-making that, in endorsing the “given” world, furthers a reproductive and expansionist status quo. This project is partly funded by the SSHRC Insight Development Grant "Eco-accretion: Downsizing the Environmental Humanities." The first excerpt from To Mean the World, “Just Sabotage,” was printed in the Fall 2024 issue of Critical Inquiry. The second, “Enemies of the People,” will appear in the Winter 2025 issue of Representations. The former examines absurdist comedies and argues that the sabotage of energy infrastructures cannot “make sense,” for it poses a necessary threat to coherence, removing without replacing the material and discursive conditions that grant the climate movement its meaning and purpose within late capitalism and late liberalism. The latter turns to melodramas of toxic contamination in order to consider the case of whistleblowing, a journalistic and legal means of condemnation and redress that maintains its symbolic integrity as an “environmental action” in the non-event of its deferral, while it still carries the brittle promise that the right datum, communicated the right way, suffices to “change the world.” I am now researching and writing chapters on prosopopoeia and nuclear apocalypse as well as parataxis and natality.

A full, hyperlinked list of my 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 my personal site: https://jeanthomastremblay.carrd.co/.

Prior to working at York, I 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

Upcoming Courses