Verena Conley

Verena Conley

Long Term Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literature
Director of Graduate Studies
Verna Conley

Verena Andermatt Conley is Long-Term Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literature. Faculty Associate at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, she writes on current dilemmas in the natural and urban environments. Her work includes Rethinking Technologies (two editions, 1993 and 1997), a book of essays that takes a critical assessment of urbanization under the impact of electronic technologies. In Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Theory (1997), she explores the covert ecological dimension in post-structural theory and studies its impact on questions concerning environmental reform. Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, States and World-Space in French Cultural Theory (2012. 2014), explores the spatial turn in French cultural and critical theory since 1968. She examines how, among a panoply of writers and filmmakers, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Augé, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour and Etienne Balibar, reconsider the experience of urban space in the midst of current political and economic turmoil. A new book-project, On Care: A Plea for Etho-Ecology, argues for the importance of habitability in today’s world by meshing the discipline of ethology with that of ecology. She is now finishing a book on a colonial garden, From Colony to Ecology: The Jardin d’essai du Hamma in Algiers (forthcoming 2022). Based on her doctoral dissertation, Littérature, politique et communisme: Lire ‘Les Lettres françaises’ (1942-1970) on the reorganization of city-space in the postwar years appeared in 2005. Author of a autographical memoir under consideration for a feature film, The War against the Beavers (2003) studies habitat and environmental issues in the area of the Quetico and Boundary Waters Wilderness. She has held visiting or tenured professorships at the University of California-Berkeley (1978-79), Miami University (1982, 1990-94), the University of California-Los Angeles (1995), and the Universty of Paris-VIII (1983-84). Awards include Fellowships at the Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France), the National Endowment of the Humanities (1985-86), and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Center (Georgetown, Washington, D.C.). In 2015, at the annual congress of the American Association of Geographers, a seminar was devoted to her work on ecology and topography. In 2019 she taught a seminar on ecology and literature at the Delphi Academy of European Culture in Delphi, Greece. She is teaching courses and seminars such as Parisian Cityscapes, the Global City, Politics of Aesthetics. She served as Faculty Dean at the Kirkland House, Harvard University from 2000 to 2020. A native speaker of German and French, she is currently Director of Graduate Studies in Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature and Head of the French Section of the Department of Romance Languages.