Thomas Pavel

Thomas Pavel serves as the Gordon J. Laird Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature, as well as in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.  Having earned his MA at the University of Bucharest and his Doctorat 3e cycle at the Université de Paris 3, in the past he taught at the University of Ottawa, Université du Québec à Montréal, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Princeton University.

His works ask three major questions: what makes literary works intelligible? how do they interact with human moral concerns? how does diversity and competition shape literary-cultural history?

He is the author of Fictional Worlds (Harvard University Press, 1986, Italian translation, Einaudi, 1992, Spanish translation 1996, Czech translation 2012), The Spell of Language:  Post-structuralism and speculation (Blackwell, 1989, new, revised edition University of Chicago Press, 2001, French edition, Minuit, 1988, Portuguese translation 1990, Czech translation forthcoming), L’Art de l’éloignement.  Essai sur l’imagination classique (Paris: Folio, Gallimard, 1996) and La Pensée du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 2003, Spanish translation 2004, Romanian translation 2005, new, revised French version, Folio, Gallimard, 2015) The American version The Lives of the Novel was published by Princeton University Press in 2013, Italian translation, Mimesis, 2015, Japanese and Turkish translations forthcoming.