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Newest Jones Professor plans literary endeavors, Quebec studies
Jean-Jacques Thomas, recruited to UB as Melodia E. Jones Professor of French, also will serve as associate director of Canadian studies for Quebec affairs and programs. Photo: Douglas Levere
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“I like Quebec very much. They created a culture on their own; they are neither a subaltern nor a replica of France.”
When Jean-Jacques Thomas made the move from Duke University to UB this fall, several factors happily coincided to bring him on campus.
Recruited to be the Melodia E. Jones Professor of French, Thomas knew firsthand of the chair’s history and prestige.
“Thirty years ago, when I was a young assistant professor at the University of Michigan, I traveled from Ann Arbor with two colleagues through the snow and slush to hear René Girard, then the Jones Chair,” Thomas recalls. Fifteen years later, Thomas was in Buffalo again, this time to confer on a literary journal with Raymond Federman, distinguished professor emeritus and former Jones Chair holder.
Thomas follows a long line of eminent figures who’ve held the Jones Chair, established in 1930 by a Buffalo woman who loved the French language and stipulated that the chair be an outstanding French-born scholar. Previously professor of romance studies, literature and linguistics at Duke, Thomas also has been named UB associate director of Canadian studies for Quebec affairs and programs.
Another attraction for Thomas was UB’s well-known strength in poetics that matched his own academic specialization. And with UB 2020’s commitment to internationalism and Canadian studies, he could build on his experiences at Duke, where he had created faculty exchanges with Quebec universities and run a successful Quebec film festival.
In all, says the genial native of Arras in northern France, “coming here was a promotion and probably I’m happier here intellectually.”
Like the 17th-century founders of New France, Thomas has the experience of making his way in the New World. Indeed, he spoke no English when he came to the University of Michigan on a faculty exchange after earning his doctorate from Université de Paris-Sorbonne in 1972. He went on to master English not through formal lessons, but rather through television, a lifelong passion for movies and the linguistic intensity of poetics itself. His career has been mainly at North American universities, including those in Quebec.
“I like Quebec very much,” Thomas says. “They created a culture on their own; they are neither a subaltern nor a replica of France. Unlike Quebec, French culture didn’t have to deal with the new and with a vast wilderness. As a Frenchman, I can see what French culture can do in a North American environment. It’s a virtual reality of what France could become, but at the same time cannot become. I find this fascinating intellectually.”
At UB, Thomas hopes to build exchanges and other programs that would take advantage of Buffalo’s proximity to Canada. Such initiatives might explore security issues, the nature and meaning of national borders, or the role of Quebec as a major energy producer.
Meanwhile, Thomas moves adroitly between cultures; for example, serving as literary director of Presses Universitaires du Nouveau Monde, the largest publisher of books in French in the U.S. and one that specializes in Francophone world literature. He also champions the works of a diverse set of writers, including the French “post-poet” Jean-Marie Gleize and the Haitian-Canadian novelist Dany Laferrière.
Last spring, Thomas presented awards to high school French students at a ceremony of the Alliance Française de Buffalo. The event demonstrated what Thomas calls “the special bond” that exists between the Jones Chair and local French speakers and Francophiles. “There are traces of the former French presence In Western New York,” Thomas points out. “For Mme. Jones, she wanted an assurance that French would always be present.”
With Thomas’s presence, chances are the language and culture Jones so cherished and tried to protect will continue to flourish in Western New York.
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