Thomas C. Connolly earned his BA in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford (2002). From 2002 to 2005 he studied at the École normale supérieure (Ulm) as an élève de la Sélection internationale, completing a Maîtrise and a Diplôme d’études approfondies at the Université de Paris IV–Sorbonne. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2005 and received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University (2012).
Thomas’s research spans nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century French and francophone poetry in the contexts of Europe, the Maghreb, and the Caribbean, with particular attention to the prose poem, poetic obscurity, ekphrasis, and the relationship between literature and the visual arts.
He is currently completing Presque imaginaires: autour du poème en prose, a study of the poetic and critical writings of Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud who, in radical yet distinct ways, transform what it means to write and read poetry in the modern era. If the French prose poem emerged around the 1840s as a means of breaking free from the constraints of prosody and versification that had governed poetry since the Renaissance, for these poets, it becomes a site of experimentation and innovation, even as they continue to explore the expressive potential of traditional verse forms. The prose poem also serves as a catalyst for other novel modes – among them vers libre and the poème critique – such that, by the end of the century, it has become an established genre, even as it ceases to serve as the crucible of poetic invention.
His most recent book – A Poetic Genealogy of North African Literature (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2025) – focuses on francophone poetry in the Maghreb. It is driven, in part, by an observation by Abdelkébir Khatibi that poetry is a form of dissymmetry that, rather than reflecting what we already know, pushes us toward the unexpected, the uncomfortable, and the uncanny. Engaging texts by Jean Amrouche, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Jean Sénac, Tahar Djaout, Nabile Farès, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Arthur Rimbaud on their own terms, the book allows these works to dislocate and transform how we think about the Maghreb and its literature. This opens onto a wide range of topics — poetics, aesthetics, religion, sexuality, visuality, ekphrasis, orality, and inscription — and initiates conversations with cultural expressions less frequently associated with North African studies, from Greek myth and postmodernist European painting to mystical Catholic poetry in French and ancient theological debates between Islam and Christianity. The book has been reviewed in the Journal of North African Literature and H-France Review.
Thomas is the author of Paul Celan’s Unfinished Poetics: Readings in the Sous-Oeuvre (Cambridge: MHRA/Legenda, 2018 [hardback] / 2019 [paperback], a monograph on the German-language Jewish poet Paul Celan that draws on theories of textual criticism to develop new practices of reading poetry in marginalia and unpublished texts.
He is also the guest editor of three issues of Yale French Studies: a double issue entitled “North African Poetry in French” (137-138 [2020]) and, most recently, “Baudelaire’s Worlds” (148 [2026]). Alongside Adrien Cavallaro (Université Grenoble Alpes), he is currently co-editor of Parade sauvage: revue d’études rimbaldiennes.