Thomas Murphy joined New College in 2024 as a Career Development Fellow in French. He received a BA in Foreign Languages (French/Ancient Greek) from Austin Peay State University, a small state university in Middle Tennessee, and an MA, MPhil and PhD from New York University in French Literature, during which time he also completed graduate coursework at Princeton, the Sorbonne and the EHESS. In 2021-2022 he was the recipient of a Georges Lurcy Trust fellowship and was a visiting researcher (pensionnaire étranger) at the École normale supérieure. In 2022-2023 he was an invited doctoral researcher (doctorant-chercheur invité) at Sorbonne Université. In addition to French, Thom taught Latin language and authors for a number of years at the Latin/Greek Institute, CUNY/Brooklyn College’s 50-year-running intensive Latin program.
TEACHING
At New College Thom teaches the early modern papers (Papers VII and X), as well as first-year medieval and early modern texts and first-year translation.
RESEARCH
Thom is broadly interested in the intersection of pre-modern scientific thought and the humanistic tradition broadly (especially learned poetry and philology) in the early modern world. His first book project, entitled Translating ‘Nature’ in Early Modern France, studies the evolving meaning of the French word ‘nature’, as well as the Latin and Greek equivalents natura and phusis, in sixteenth-century France. Built around a diverse set of philological case studies of translations from Greek and Latin (of Du Bellay, Henri Estienne, Jean Fernel, Guy Le Fèvre de La Boderie and others), this study argues that these key terms are the reflection of a concept of nature in the process of change long before the ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. His next book project investigates the conceptual aftershocks of Florentine Platonism as reflected in the emergence of so-called ‘scientific poetry’ in French from the 16th through the 18th centuries.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
– ‘Guy Le Fèvre de La Boderie et la science nouvelle’, in Écopoétique des siècles anciens, ed. Louis-Patrick Bergot. Presses universitaires de Strasbourg. (forthcoming)
– ‘From Contemplation to Composition: Translating Physiology in the Early Modern Period’ [peer-reviewed chapter], in Debating Human Nature and Its Limitations: 1600–2000, eds. Jil Muller and Guido Giglioni. Palgrave Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine. (forthcoming)
– ‘Introduction’ (with Olivier Halévy and Adèle Payen de la Garanderie), in Le Verger, no. spécial: ‘Représenter la nature dans la poésie française de la Renaissance (1550–1600)’, eds. Olivier Halévy, Thomas A. Murphy and Adèle Payen de la Garanderie. (forthcoming)
– ‘L’Humanisme en formule. Itinéraires de l’Homo sum de Térence (XVe-XIXe siècle)’, in Fabula-LhT, no. 30: ‘La littérature en formules’, eds. Olivier Belin, Anne-Claire Bello and Luciana Radut-Gaghi. 2023.
– ‘Définir la nature à la Renaissance : le monde et le sexe dans l'atelier du lexicographe’, in Albineana, no. 34: ‘Présence et paradigmes du monde naturel’, ed. Cécile Huchard, pp. 25-47. Classiques Garnier. 2023.