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Downing A. Thomas

Interim Associate Provost and
Dean, International Programs
Director, UI Center for Human Rights
Professor
email Downing Thomas
1111 University Capitol Centre
335-0373

Currliculum Vitae
Selected Publications

The bulk of my scholarship in early-modern French studies (~1600 to ~1800) can be divided into three interdisciplinary areas, with a considerable amount of overlap between areas: music and opera, theories of language, and aesthetics. Music and opera are central to my first two books, both of which were published in (different) series devoted to issues in musicology: Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime: 1647-1785 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), and Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). Reflection on language was also at the core of my first book, and is an area I have explored in several articles, most notably in an article on the philosopher Condillac and his critique of the naturalist Buffon, published in 2003 in a forum on dispute in Common Knowledge alongside a contribution by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A preoccupation with aesthetics runs through all of my work up to the present, and is the specific focus of my latest book project in which I will examine the tension between interest--presumably at the center of aesthetic experiences--and disinterestedness, the criterion that came to define the aesthetic experience at least by the time of Kant. The project is focused on aesthetics insofar as it concerns the relationship of the external and the internal, the objects of the senses and the perceiving self.

I have edited, with Roberta Marvin, a cross-disciplinary volume of essays in opera studies (Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries in Musical Drama [Ashgate, 2006]), and have had the opportunity to participate in symposia in conjunction with staged performances of operas in New York City, Berkeley, and Iowa City. I am past recipient of a McMaster University / American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, and an American Council of Learned Societies international travel grant; and was recently elected to the Executive Committee of the Eighteenth-Century French Literature division and to the Executive Committee of the section on Opera as a Literary and Dramatic Form, both within the Modern Language Association. I served as 2007 President of the Association of Departments of Foreign Language.

The courses I teach range from advanced undergraduate language and literature classes to graduate seminars on issues in eighteenth-century studies, including a recent course on identity and otherness in Enlightenment fiction.