Above image from Philippe Quesne's La Nuit des Taupes, featured on book cover of Usher, Exterranean.

Short Profile

Phillip John Usher is a scholar of Comparative and French-language literature at New York University, where he is also Chair of the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture.

His research is increasingly situated at the crossroads of early modern studies and contemporary theory, with a particular emphasis on classical reception and the conceptual histories of cartography and ecological thought. Usher is the author, translator, or (co-)editor of many volumes. For a sense of his recent work, see "Untranslating the Anthropocene" in Diacritics (on Project Muse), his latest monograph Exterranean: Ecologies of Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene (New York: Fordham UP, March 2019), as well as the co-edited volume (with Pauline Goul), Early Modern Écologies (Amsterdam :  Amsterdam UP, 2020).