Jean Jacques Thomas, Ph.D.

Jean-Jacques Thomas is Professor Emeritus of Romance Studies, Literature and Linguistics at Duke University. He taught at the Université de Paris-VIII, the University of Michigan and at Columbia University; for three years he was a Visiting Professor at UQAM; in 2005 he was appointed Associate Faculty Member at the Centre d'Etudes Poétiques of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He is a member of the COS (Comité d'Orientation Scientifique - International Expert, Humanities) for the French Universities of Aix-Marseille (Provence, Méditerranée, Paul Cézanne). He has published several books on poetics and contemporary French literature: Lire Leiris: essai d'étude poétique d'un fonctionnement analinguistique (Paris, 1972); Poétique générative (Paris, 1978); Poética Générativa (Buenos Aires, 1982; new and augmented edition, 1989); La langue, la poésie (Lille, 1989); Yves Bonnefoy: A Concordance (New York, 1990); La langue volée (Berne, 1990). With Steven Winspur he co-authored Poeticized Language (Penn State Press, 2000). He translated into French The Semiotic Web [La Toile sémiotique] by Thomas Sebeok (Bruxelles, 1981) and Semiotics of Poetry [Sémiotique de la poésie] by Michael Riffaterre (Paris, 1983). He is a founding editor and a member of the editorial board of the European journal FPC (2003) and an associate editor of Poetics Today; he is a member of the editorial boards of Studies in 20th-Century Literature, Sub-Stance, and a former member of the Advisory Editorial Committee of PMLA. He is Directeur Littéraire (Editor-in-chief) of PUNM (New Orleans). He was chair of several MLA divisional committees and an elected member of the Delegate Assembly (1993-1998 Theoretical linguistics; 2001-2004 -- Politics of the Profession); in 2003 he was asked to be a candidate for the MLA Executive Committee (declined). Since 1996 he is a national member for the AP evaluation board and was a member of the Coalition Group of Foreign Languages Specialists which produced the National Standards for Foreign Languages (Project 2000).