Overview
The author of some fifteen scholarly books and of five literary volumes, Laurent Dubreuil seeks to explore the boundaries of what we can think, say, and live, with a particular regard for the powers and nature of the extraordinary and of (artistic) creation. Dubreuil wrote about haunting, friendship, colonialism, literariness, disciplinarity, cognition, language, animals, politics, poetics, modernity, artificial intelligence, minds, or plants, working primarily, in a comparative and theoretical sense, on texts and images—across historical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries—, but also through experiments or experiences, and with “non-human” agents (be they great apes or computers).
At Cornell, Laurent Dubreuil is a Professor in the Department of Romance Studies, where he is currently serving as Director of Graduate Studies, in the Department of Comparative Literature, and in the Cognitive Science Program and Graduate field. He is the Director of the French Studies Program and the founding Director of the Humanities Lab. Dubreuil is also the IWLC Senior International Chair of Transcultural Theory at Tsinghua University in Beijing. In the past, he held visiting appointments in universities located in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. Over the last few years, Prof. Dubreuil partook in what is now known as “public humanities,” penning articles and op-eds for the general press, especially in Les cahiers du cinema and Harper's Magazine, as well as for the newspapers Le monde and The Wall Street Journal.
Laurent Dubreuil’s forthcoming books in 2024-25 include: Humanities in the Time of AI (U of Minnesota P), an essay on the role and function of the discursive disciplines in the era of generative artificial intelligence; More Than Global, his first volume to appear in Chinese, an inquiry on transcultural comparisons and cosmopolitanisms (The Commercial Press); and Violences identitaires (Mialet-Barrault & Flammarion), a reflection on race and politics, co-authored in French with philosopher Norman Ajari. In parallel, Dubreuil is a principal investigator for several ongoing research efforts, all under the aegis of the Humanities Lab, most notably: a comparison between human and AI poetry (led with psychologist Morten Christiansen) and on which he recently published an article in Harper’s; an investigation on the semantics of indigeneity in French through both natural language processing and humanistic methods (supervised with “Francophonist” Imane Terhmina); a project on the interrelation between language and painting in a group of bonobos on which he previously co-wrote the book Dialogues on the Human Ape (U of Minnesota P: 2019) with primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. Dubreuil is also part of several collaborative and artistic endeavors, especially, this year, the Odyssea Americana, a performance and exhibition that he conceived, in the wake of his 2024 book on the vegetal world in Homer, with conceptual artist Laurent Derobert.
Research Focus
- Literary theory and Philosophy (esp. poetics, epistemology, politics, metaphysics, the artistic experience), with a linguistic focus on French (all periods and countries, though with an emphasis on 19th-21st C.), ancient Greek (all periods), Latin (all periods), plus strong investments in German (late 18th C-20th C.), English (Renaissance, 19th-20th C.), Italian (Middle Ages, Renaissance, 20th C.), and additional interests in Haitian Creole, Chinese, Spanish.
- Poetry (in general and in particular)
- Cognitive Science and the Humanities (esp. language, “culture” and mind in human and non-human apes, as well artificial intelligence)
- Theory and practice of Comparative Literature, interdisciplinarity, and “transcultural” approaches, as well as epistemic transfers between the sciences and the humanities
- Visual arts, including cinema, especially 20th-21st C.
Publications
Books
- Botaniser l’Odyssée (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2024)
- L’élargissement francophone (Paris: Champion, 2024)
- Les contes du Plateau haut (Paris: Les Murmurations, 2024)
- Comment écrire aujourd’hui (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2021)
- Dialogues on the Human Ape (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2019)
- Baudelaire au gouffre de la modernité (Paris: Hermann, 2019)
- La dictature des identités (Paris: Gallimard, 2019)
- Portraits de l’Amérique en jeune morte (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2019)
- Poetry and Mind (New York: Fordham UP, 2018)
- The Refusal of Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016)
- The Intellective Space (Minneapolis: The U of Minnesota P, 2015).
- Génération romantique (Paris: Gallimard, 2014).
- Empire of Language (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2013).
- Pures fictions (Paris: Gallimard, 2013).
- À force d’amitié (Paris: Hermann, 2009)
- L’état critique de la littérature (Paris: Hermann, 2009)
- De l’attrait à la possession (Paris: Hermann, 2003)
Articles
- "Friends of War" Oxford Literary Review, 2009.
- "What Is Literature's Now?" New Literary History, 2007.
- "Leaving Politics. Bios, Zoe, Life" Diacritics, 2007.
- "The Presences of Deconstruction" New Literary History, 2006.
Edited Journal Issues
- Labyrinthe 32, 2009: Le petit théâtre intellectuel [Co-ed.]
- Labyrinthe 28, 2007: La Fin des disciplines?
- Labyrinthe 25, 2006: La Bande dessinée, Ce qu'elle dit, ce qu'elle montre [Co-ed.]
- Labyrinthe 24, 2006: Faut-il être postcolonial?
- Labyrinthe 19, 2004: Le bel aujourd'hui. Déclins, décadences, apocalypses.
- Labyrinthe 14, 2003: Constructions de la raison.