Vincent BruyereAssociate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies 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. The ambition of my research program is to reimagine the role assigned to the study of texts and images from the past in an intellectual context where the Anthropocene hypothesis is redrawing the contours of historical time.

I am the author of three single-authored 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), and Environmental Humanities on the Brink: The Vanitas Hypothesis (Stanford University Press, 2023). Perishability Fatigue received a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award in the category “Earth in Crisis.”

My most recent book, Environmental Humanities on the Brink, is inspired by the early modern vanitas tradition. A vanitas image is the pictorial equivalent of an open landfill where material possessions and human remains are laid to rest side by side. What I find fascinating from the perspective of environmental humanities is that the expression of contempt for a world of material possessions in vanitas images is not incompatible with its intense investment in the naturalistic reproduction of the very object of contempt. Vanitas images openly declare their own pointlessness without being defeated by this admission. In other words, the vanitas tradition doesn’t have to be depressing and nihilistic. In fact, it has a unique way to bring humanistic inquiry back to Earth and, more pointedly, back to a memory of the world deposited in the historical record.

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. The book is forthcoming with Springer Nature for the Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine series.

In Fall 2023, I was a Käte Hamburger fellow at the Center for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) in Heidelberg, Germany.

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.