Jan Miernowski
Position title: Professor of French - Department of French and Italian
Email: jmiernow@wisc.edu
Languages: Polish, French, English.
Research Interests: French literature and culture, Renaissance studies, literary responses to early modern philosophy, theology and political rhetoric, early modern humanism and 20th -century anti-humanism, digital humanities and e-Learning.
Education: Doctorat, Université de Paris X-Nanterre.
Departments: Department of French and Italian (departmental profile here).
About:
Jan Miernowski’s research and teaching interests focus on the aesthetic response of literature to the diverse discourses of early modern philosophy, theology, science and politics. His doctoral thesis was devoted to the poetic expression of Renaissance logic. The subsequent books comprise a wide-ranging study of the impact of negative theology on French 16th-century poetry, on Medieval and Renaissance philosophy, as well as specifically on the poetics of Montaigne’s skepticism. He published in Polish a monograph on allegory in French literature from the Roman de la rose to Pascal, and a co-authored critical edition of poetry by Peletier du Mans. Jan Miernowski’s most recent books include a monograph on the aesthetics of hatred in French and Francophone literature from the 16th to the 21st century, as well as an edited volume on the interplay between the grotesque and the sublime. He is currently working on the philosophical and literary conceptions of humanism in the 16th and in the 20th centuries. Jan Miernowski led a team of multimedia specialists and scholars (Chris Kleinhenz, Ullrich Langer, Jane Tylus) who designed a fully online and highly interactive course on French and Italian Renaissance Literature.
Selected Publications:
Books
Dialectique et connaissance dans La Sepmaine de du Bartas, Discours sur discours infiniment divers, (Geneva: Droz, 1992).
Anteros, Actes de colloque de Madison, Edited in collaboration with Ullrich Langer, (Orléans: Paradigme, 1994).
Signes dissimilaires. La quête des noms divins dans la poésie française de la Renaissance, (Genève, Droz, 1997).
Le Dieu Néant. Théologies négatives à l’aube des temps modernes, (Leiden – New York – Koln, E. J. Brill, 1998).
L’ontologie de la contradiction sceptique. Pour une étude de la métaphysique des Essais, (Champion, Paris, 1998).
Piekne banialuki, ku najlepszej prawdzie wylozone, czyli alegoria jako prowokacja w literaturze starofrancuskiej [Fine idiocies interpreted in the most perfect sense. Allegory as Provocation in French Medieval and Early-Modern Literature]- (Warsaw, Czytelnik, 2000).
Bog-Nicosc, Teologie negatywne u progu czasow nowozytnych, (Warszawa, Polska Akademia Nauk Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii, 2000).
Critical edition: Euvres poetiques intitulez louanges, by Jacques Peletier du Mans, co-authored with S. Arnaud and S. Bamforth (Paris, Champion, 2005).
La Beauté de la haine. Essais de misologie littéraire, (Geneva: Droz, 2014).
Le Sublime et le grotesque, ed. by Jan Miernowski, (Geneva: Droz, 2014).
Early Modern Humanism and Postmodern Antihumanism in Dialogue, ed. Jan Miernowski (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)