Tom Conley
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow in History - Class of Spring 2020

Tom Conley is the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor at Harvard University, where he focuses on relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. Conley completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, after prior studies at Lawrence University, Columbia University, and the Sorbonne. His many books include Film Hieroglyphs (Minnesota, 1991, new edition 2006), The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern Writing (Cambridge, 1992), The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minnesota, 1996, new edition 2010), An Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Early Modern France (Minnesota, 2011), and À fleur de page: Voir et lire le texte de la Renaissance (Garnier, 2015). Conley has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, L’Ecole de Chartes, and L’Ecole en Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, among other institutions. He has held fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Guggenheim Foundation. In December 2011, the Université Blaise-Pascal awarded Conley an honorary doctorate; in 2014, former students Bernd Renner and Phillip Usher co-edited a Festschrift of thirty essays, Illustrations conscientes: Mélanges en honneur de Tom Conley (Éditions Classiques Garnier).

Project Description

The Engineer’s Art: Survey, Space, and Writing in early Modern France, 1580-1640

Conley locates his Academy project, “The Engineer’s Art,” in a growing academic field that studies literature and the fine arts in relation to the history and theory of cartography. He examines how spatial reason informs a range of documents created in early modern France—maps, novels, poetry, polemical tracts, broadsheets, and atlases. Working with and against Michel Foucault’s “heuristic distinction,” which holds that the year 1600 marks a turn from a “proto-scientific logic of representation” to a “time-held process of analogy,” Conley identifies areas where the two appear inextricable. Following art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (and later Leo Steinberg and Gilles Deleuze), Conley asks if a Renaissance conception of a “window on the world” suddenly gives way to a Baroque view of the world as a “flatbed” grid. In so doing, he argues that science and the creative imagination are historically enmeshed: maps, topographical surveys, novels, poems, and printed images are in flux. Conley will juxtapose documents otherwise studied in canonical isolation to attest to the concomitant forces of analogy and spatial process—forces that continue to shape media in our age.

Academy Activities

23 Apr 20
The Engineer’s Art: Spatial Thinking and Imagination in Seventeenth-Century France Humanities

Nina Maria Gorrissen Lecture

The Engineer’s Art: Spatial Thinking and Imagination in Seventeenth-Century France

CANCELLED: This event was cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience.

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24 Mar 20

Fellow Spotlight: Tom Conley

Tom Conley is the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor at Harvard University, where he focuses on relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. In his Academy project, he examines how spatial reason informs a range of documents created in early modern France such as maps, novels ...

Read more
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