Laurent Dubreuil

Professor of French, Francophone & Comparative Literature

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

Articles

Edited Journal Issues

 

In the news

Image of Laurent Dubreuil
K260 Klarman Hall
ld79@cornell.edu
607/255-3675

Education

  • Agrégation (French & Comparative Literature), 1996
  • Ecole normale supérieure, Paris, 1994-1999
  • Doctorate (French, Francophone & Comparative Literature), University of Bordeaux, France, 2001
  • Doctorate (Philosophy & Women Studies), University of Paris, 2002

Departments and programs

  • Cognitive Science Program
  • Comparative Literature
  • French Studies Program
  • Romance Studies

Affiliated Colleges

  • College of Arts and Sciences