I am an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities and hold graduate appointments in Humanities, English, Social and Political Thought, and Science and Technology 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 the role that 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.” Interviews around Breathing Aesthetics are available via the DUP blog (https://rb.gy/tkpggi) and the Black Agenda Report (https://rb.gy/p38gyz).

My two current book projects expand my interrogation of the pedagogical and moral duty with which ecocritics, and environmental humanists more broadly, often entrust representations of nature. The first of these book projects, titled Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction and coauthored with Steven Swarbrick (Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image series, Northwestern University Press), inquires into the formalization and materialization by film of life’s heightened paradoxes amid the sixth mass species extinction. Encounters with negative life 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.

The Art of Climate Inaction, the solo book project to which I will devote most of my research energies over the next few years, returns to the question of aesthetic education from a new angle. The book’s title is oxymoronic: an art of inaction is implausible, for art implies mediation, and mediation gestures. The book’s cross-media case studies cannot relay actional insights, as it were, about inaction. Yet they can, and do, prompt us to unlearn our certainty as to what constitutes an action, as well as our certainty that “action” is the best unit for evaluating social and political progress. This unlearning, I wager, promises to interrupt the “eco-accretive” loop in which both environmentalists and environmental humanists are caught, one that tolerates, as the sole acceptable solution to destructive actions, additional actions that are, at minimum, less destructive and, at best, restorative.

Information on 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 in the appropriate section. A full list of publications 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.

Preferred third-person pronouns: he/they

Research Interests

Current Courses

I am an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities and hold graduate appointments in Humanities, English, Social and Political Thought, and Science and Technology 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 the role that 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.” Interviews around Breathing Aesthetics are available via the DUP blog (https://rb.gy/tkpggi) and the Black Agenda Report (https://rb.gy/p38gyz).

My two current book projects expand my interrogation of the pedagogical and moral duty with which ecocritics, and environmental humanists more broadly, often entrust representations of nature. The first of these book projects, titled Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction and coauthored with Steven Swarbrick (Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image series, Northwestern University Press), inquires into the formalization and materialization by film of life’s heightened paradoxes amid the sixth mass species extinction. Encounters with negative life 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.

The Art of Climate Inaction, the solo book project to which I will devote most of my research energies over the next few years, returns to the question of aesthetic education from a new angle. The book’s title is oxymoronic: an art of inaction is implausible, for art implies mediation, and mediation gestures. The book’s cross-media case studies cannot relay actional insights, as it were, about inaction. Yet they can, and do, prompt us to unlearn our certainty as to what constitutes an action, as well as our certainty that “action” is the best unit for evaluating social and political progress. This unlearning, I wager, promises to interrupt the “eco-accretive” loop in which both environmentalists and environmental humanists are caught, one that tolerates, as the sole acceptable solution to destructive actions, additional actions that are, at minimum, less destructive and, at best, restorative.

Information on 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 in the appropriate section. A full list of publications 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.

Preferred third-person pronouns: he/they

Degrees

Research Interests

Current Courses