Thomas Parker
Title: Visiting Assistant Professor of French
Department: French and Francophone Studies
Office: Chicago Hall 113
Phone: 845.437.7572
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Biography
Thomas Parker specializes in Early Modern literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University, and lectured at Princeton before coming to Vassar in 2005.
He has worked and published on a broad range of topics on the history of ideas and aesthetic practices in France’s Early Modern period, ranging from materialism and politics to literary theory and philosophical vagueness. His book Volition, Rhetoric, and Emotion in the Work of Pascal is forthcoming from Routledge in 2007.
Most recently, in 2007, he used a Carolyn Grant award and a grant for Mellon Faculty Enhancement to complete research in France on his new book project: the Ancien Régime and the origins of terroir. At Vassar, he co-teaches with a professor of geography and geology a course on the subject called Terroir: Literary and Scientific Lessons on How to Taste the Earth.