Comp Lit is pleased to announce that Martin Crowley will be spending his sabbatical hosted by our department. Below please find a description of his work. He is looking forward to participating in events and meeting students and faculty.
Martin Crowley is Reader in Modern French Thought and Culture at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Anthony L. Lyster Fellow and Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages at Queens' College. His research focusses on French philosophy, literature and film post-1945, with a consistent interest in the conceptual and aesthetic negotiation of ethical and political questions. He is the author of Duras, Writing and the Ethical (Oxford University Press, 2000), of two books on Robert Antelme (one in English (Legenda, 2003), and one in French (Lignes, 2004)), and of L'Homme sans: Politiques de la finitude (Lignes, 2009; afterword by Jean-Luc Nancy). He is also co-author, with Victoria Best, of The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film (Manchester University Press, 2007), editor of Dying Words: The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers (Rodopi, 2000) and Contact! The Art of Touch (L'Esprit Créateur, 2007), and co-editor of Quels matérialismes? Pour quels mondes? (Lignes, 2016; with Michel Surya) and Economies of Existence (Diacritics, forthcoming; with Emily Apter). From January 2019, he will be General Editor of the journal French Studies.
While at NYU, he will be working on two book projects. The first of these (which he will be attempting to finish) is entitled The Accidental Agent: Politics without Transcendence in Latour, Stiegler and Malabou: this examines the possibility of an effective, decisive politics which would not rely on human exceptionalism, through consideration of this question in the work of its three authors and case studies of contemporary political scenarios. The second (which he is hoping to start) is entitled Arts of Opacity, Arts of War, and looks at the relation between forms of cultural production and social conflict in contemporary France.
