Fellowship / Fellows

Tom Conley

  • 2011–2012
  • Humanities
  • Walter Jackson Bate Fellow
  • Harvard University
Headshot of Tom Conley
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Tom Conley is the Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. He works along the edges of early modern studies, with emphasis on the history of cartography, French literature and culture, and film studies (where stress is placed on visual theory). Recent work along these lines includes An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Cartographic Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

At the Radcliffe Institute, Conley will complete a study of Baroque literature and cartography in France, 1580–1640. He aims to understand how the advent of new modes of spatial reasoning, especially in military cartography, informed poetry and literature as well as philosophy. He will devote special study to cartographers and writers affiliated with the engineer.

Conley is the author of The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 2010), The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (Cambridge University Press, 1992; French translation, 2000), and Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 1991, 2006). He also contributed to Cartography in the European Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2007), edited by David Woodward, and has translated works by Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and others, most recently Marc Augé′s Casablanca: Movies and Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He has been comaster of Kirkland House at Harvard University since 2000.

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