House Masters

Verena Conley
Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literature
vconley@fas.harvard.edu
617-495-2272 (office) or 617-495-2274 (home)

Tom and Verena Conley are responsible for the general administration of the House. They coordinate policies, supervise appointments, and oversee the welfare of the House community. The Co-Masters regularly open their home to all members of Kirkland House during their Masters' Open Houses, announced on the online house calendar  here as well as by posters in the main archway and dining hall. You can also see pictures of these and other recent Kirkland House events  here. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend!

 TOM CONLEY
I came to Harvard in 1995 and to the Kirkland House in 2000. Trained in French literature at Columbia University (M.A.) and the University of Wisconsin (Ph.D.), I taught at a number of institutions (Minnesota, UC-Berkeley, UCLA, Miami of Ohio, the Graduate Center of CUNY) before joining Romance Languages and, more recently, the Film and Visual Studies Program in VES (Visual & Environmental Studies). My research has been devoted to cartography and literature. A rival passion is in film studies that range from the silent era up to now. In 2003-4 a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed me to complete Cartography and Cinema (2007) and to complete a translation and American edition of Marc Augé, Casablanca: Movies & Memory (2009). While on leave at the Kirkland House in 2007 I finished An Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Early Modern France (2011), a sequel to (and bookend for a new edition of) The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (2011). In 2010 I led a seminar on film theory at the Ecole en Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and in 2011-12 I was a fellow at the Radcliffe Center for Advanced Research. In that year the Université Blaise-Pascal (Clermont-Ferrand) graciously awarded me an honorary doctorate. In 2014 The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, co-edited with friend and colleague Jeff Kline (of Boston University), is destined to appear. Over the years a devotee of handball (“the perfect game”), I have played in the cavernous courts of the Boston Central YMCA, a home away from home. I am an indelible Red Sox fan who loves dogs and the great outdoors.

VERENA CONLEY
I was born in Zurich, Switzerland and spent my childhood on the shores of Lake Geneva. Raised bilingually in a family that specialized in business in Southeast Asia, I quickly developed a liking for other languages and cultures. After an education in the liberal arts built around seven years of Latin, a Fulbright fellowship allowed me to settle on American shores. I turned resolutely to modern studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, earning my Ph.D. in French and Comparative Literature. I have taught at several institutions, including Miami University, the University of Paris-VIII, the University of California at Berkeley, and UCLA. At Harvard, I teach in Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures. This year, I will be offering courses on Parisian cityscapes, Politics of Aesthetics: Worlds, Matter, Objects, Mediterranean Spaces: Literature of North Africa and Poetic Revolutions: French poetry of the 19^th and 20^th century. I write about contemporary French theory and culture as well as the environment and technologies (Ecopolitics, Rethinking Technologies, ed.). This year, I published Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory. With a Irving Goh from Cornell University, I am co-editing a volume on the work of a contemporary French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy. A few years ago, I was Senior Fellow at the Humanities Center at Cornell where I started work on ecology and water. I continue working on this project now with a broader emphasis on ecology and sensation.

I love swimming, walking on the beach, going to movies, to Red Sox and Harvard football games as well as playing with our dogs Max and Bella. I also enjoy retreating to our cabin near the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area for the pleasure of living off the grid and in the great outdoors. You can read about my adventures with beavers and bears in my War with the Beavers.