Thomas C. Connolly teaches French, francophone, European, Maghrebi, and Caribbean poetry, from the nineteenth-century to the present. His most recent book, A Poetic Genealogy of North African Literature, takes as its point of departure a comment by Abdelkébir Khatibi, who speaks of poetry as a form of dissymmetry that exposes readers to the unexpected, and to the possibility of a transformative encounter with the text. Drawing on literary, philosophical, theoretical, and theological texts in multiple languages and scripts, as well as on the visual arts, this book delves into the poetic works of Khatibi alongside six other Maghrebi authors – Jean Amrouche, Tahar Djaout, Nabile Farès, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Jean Sénac – as well as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, to think anew about the origins and legacy of francophone poetry in the Maghreb.
Besides numerous articles, Connolly is also the author of a book on the German-language, Jewish poet Paul Celan, called Paul Celan’s Unfinished Poetics: Readings in the Sous-Oeuvre (Cambridge: MHRA/Legenda, 2018 [hardback] / 2019 [paperback]). He is currently at work on a new book project called Derrida parmi les poètes [Derrida among the Poets].
Thomas obtained his BA in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford in 2002, and studied at the École normale supérieure (Ulm) as “élève de la Sélection internationale” between 2002 and 2005, completing a “Maîtrise” and a “DEA” at the Université de Paris IV–La Sorbonne. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2005 and received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 2012.