As Professor of French, the bulk of my scholarship in early-modern French studies is focused on three thematic areas: music and the origins of language; opera; and feeling and commonality. 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 recently published in the developing field of sound studies, having written 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.

The scholarly consensus is that the Enlightenment ushered in a space of rational discussion and deliberation through which ideas could be expressed, tested through debate, and disseminated in print and through groups of “influencers” meeting in philosophical-literary gatherings known as salons for the exchange of ideas. My current book project questions the overwhelming focus of Enlightenment studies on forms of rationality and communication networks. For all the emphasis they placed on reason, early-modern philosophers and writers were immensely intrigued by that which is tangential to reason and often escapes its grasp. I make the case that that writers explored the dynamics of society by examining how connections between persons can flourish through feeling, but also the ways in which feeling and sentiment can undermine social bonds. Novels from this period explored connections and conflicts between sensation and judgment, reason and imagination, and feeling and truth, thereby scrutinizing the ties between self and other. While the bulk of recent scholarship has largely ignored form in favor of thematic questions, I argue that innovative literary “technologies” (the memoir-novel, for example) developed by early-modern novelists in representing human interaction can provide essential insights into social cohesion or disfunction.

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.

Select publications

• Francophonie of the Early Modern / Francophonie de la première modernité, special issue of the journal L’Esprit Créateur (The Johns Hopkins University Press), ed. Anny Dominique Curtius and Downing Thomas, vol. 64, no. 4 (Winter 2024).
• 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).

Select 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.

Courses taught

• 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

DOWNING THOMAS CV