Vincent BruyereWinship Distinguished Research Professor of French and Department Chair French

Ph.D. in French Studies, University of Warwick, UK

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of French and Francophone studies with a focus on environmental humanities, visual culture, and premodern sources. My work examines the formulation of the Anthropocene hypothesis and its impact on rituals of close reading and meaning-making that are commonly used in humanistic fields. 

I am the author of four books: La différence francophone: De Jean Léry à Patrick Chamoiseau (Rennes University Press, 2012); Perishability Fatigue: Forays in Environmental Loss and Decay (Columbia University Press, 2018), Environmental Humanities on the Brink: The Vanitas Hypothesis (Stanford University Press, 2023), and Epidemiological Realism (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, 2024). In 2019, Perishability Fatigue received a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award in the category “Earth in Crisis.”

In 2019, my work as an external advisor for the exhibit on the history of influenza hosted by the David J. Sencer Museum at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta planted the seeds of a research project on the notion of epidemiological realism bringing together my abiding interests in environmental humanities and health humanities. Epidemiological Realism attends to the worldbuilding properties of epidemiology through the lens of literary theory, textual analysis, and visual culture. Its argument is organized in a series of critical vignettes in which epidemiological concepts and concerns are at play, but do not saturate the scenes of reluctant belonging and contagion, thus leaving enough room for other interpretive maneuvers to flourish instead.

In 2023-24, a Käte Hamburger fellowship at the Center for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies in Heidelberg (Germany) gave me the opportunity to start working on a brief history of the postapocalyptic image titled Art History for the Vault Dwellers. Also in the work is an essay on the contribution of Bernard Palissy (1510-1589/90) to visual theory and, more specifically, to the notion of image space.

2024— Epidemiological Realism. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine series.

2024 —“Humanités médicales et humanités tout court : Un nouveau scénario.” Tangence 133.1. Special Issue: La littérature et les humanités médicales : zones de tension d’une relation problématique (2024): 13-34.

2024 — “Feeling the Apocalypse.” Center for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies Working Group Report.. https://capas.pubpub.org/pub/s5bz61ez/release/1

2023 — Environmental Humanities on the Brink: The Vanitas Hypothesis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33682

2022 — “Lascaux IV, Chauvet II, Planet B.” Substance 51 (1): 88-102. 

2019 - “Terraformings.” Imaginations: Journal of Cross-cultural Image Studies 10:2. http://imaginations.glendon.yorku.ca/?p=12547

2019 - “Puss in Boots Goes to Pleistocene Park.” Oxford Literary Review. 41.1 Ed. Sarah Wood. Special issue “Ext: Writing Extinction.” 127-140.

2018 - Perishability Fatigue: Forays in Environmental Loss and Decay. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

2018 - “Cancer Culture avant la lettre.” Somatosphere. [http://somatosphere.net/2018/07/cancer-culture-avant-la-lettre.html]  

2018 - “Stroke and the Remembered Body: You See MeDirected by Linda S. Brown, 2015.” Journal of Medical Humanities (2018): 1-5. 

2012 - La différence francophone: De Jean Léry à Patrick Chamoiseau. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012.