Downing Thomas CV

As Professor of French, the bulk of my scholarship in early-modern French studies 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). I have also begun to explore the developing field of sound studies and am currently writing on the “soundscapes” that the French described during the reciprocal embassies that were part of the diplomatic opening between France and Siam in the 1680s.  

My current book project is focused on aesthetic reflection during the early-modern period. I am exploring a series of rich and varied approaches to understanding the mechanisms behind our acts of judgment and the human capacities that are engaged in this process, approaches that grew and evolved during this period but that were effectively shut down in the wake of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Using a variety of textual platforms (theater, fiction, public debates, philosophical reflection), early-modern writers explored connections and conflicts between sensation and judgment, reason and imagination, feeling and truth, and the self and others; and they developed models of personal and social engagement that continue to have value in today’s fraught world of polarization and identity politics.  

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]). 

Having served over a decade as the University of Iowa’s associate provost and dean of International Programs, I have also published articles and presented numerous lectures focused on aspects of international education, including internationalization strategies for higher education.

Courses

• FREN:3060 - Introduction to Reading & Writing in Literature
• FREN:6020 - Studies in the Seventeenth Century
• FREN:6025 - Studies in the Eighteenth Century

Honors and Awards

• Chevalier dans l’ordre des palmes académiques (Knight in the Order of Academic Palms), French government
• Honorary Professor, Hebei Normal University, China
• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend
• American Council of Learned Societies international travel grant
• President of the Association of Departments of Foreign Language (2007)
• McMaster University / American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship
• International Education Leadership Award, Chinese Association of Iowa

Selected Publications

• Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries in Musical Drama, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing Thomas (Ashgate, 2006).
  This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying a wide range of subjects associated with the creation, performance and reception of 'opera' in varying social and historical contexts from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The volume strongly asserts that works are meaningfully transformed by the manifold circumstances of their creation and reception, and that these circumstances have an impact on the life of those works in their many transformations and on a given audience's experience of them.
• Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime: 1647-1785 (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
  My study measures a shift in the status of opera within French culture, from an uneasy absolutist vehicle and foil to spoken tragedy in the late seventeenth century, to a spectacle that had turned away from the moral aims of tragedy to embrace new concerns with sensibility and feeling.
• Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
  This book introduces a dialogue between the philosophical context in which theories of music developed during the eighteenth century and specific "anthropological fictions"--narrative accounts of the origins of human society--that demonstrate the interdependence of reflections on nature, culture, music and language.
• Empire and Occupation in France and the Francophone Worlds, eds. A. Donadey, S. Farmer, R. Scullion, D. Thomas, and S. Ungar, a special issue of Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 23.1 (1999).

Selected Articles

• "Baroque Opera," The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque (2018)
• “Mapping the Scope and Impact of International Partnerships,” IIENetworker (Fall, 2018): 13-14.
• “Global Research and Commercialization: an Under-the-Radar Next Big Thing,” IENetworker (Fall, 2013): 22-3
• “Rameau's Platée Returns: a Case of Double Identity in the Querelle des Bouffons,” Cambridge Opera Journal 18.1 (2006): 1-19.
• “Negotiating Taste in Montesquieu,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.1 (2005): 71-90.
• "Philosophy, Science, and Style: Condillac on Buffon and Figurative Language," Common Knowledge 9:2 (2003): 286-310.
• "Taste, Aesthetics and Commonality in the Encyclopédie," Using the Encyclopédie: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Reading, SVEC 2002:05 (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, 2002): 187-209.
• "Notes on Performativity and Mood in Le Mariage de Figaro and Le Nozze di Figaro," Ars Lyrica 11 (2000): 115-131.
• "Racine Redux?: the Operatic Afterlife of Phèdre," L'Esprit Créateur, special tricentennial issue on Racine, 38.2 (1998): 82-94.
• "Architectural Visions of Lyric Theater and Spectatorship in Late Eighteenth-Century France," in Representations 52 (1995): 52-75.