John D'Amico
Email: jdamico@agnesscott.edu
Office Location: Buttrick 353
Academic Degrees
- Ph.D., Harvard University
- A.M., Harvard University
- M.A., Miami University
- B.A., Miami University
Teaching and Scholarly Interests
John D’Amico specializes in modern French literature and culture. His work begins in the nineteenth century and extends into the twenty-first to explore literature’s dialogue with the visual arts, philosophy, and the history of science. His current project, "Ennui and the Fabrication of Dreams," argues that the depictions of boredom by Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, and Joris-Karl Huysmans tell the story behind literary labor by dramatizing mental activity in deviation from the standards of productivity prescribed by burgeoning industrialism. He contends that these authors’ reevaluations of wasted time took a scientific turn in that period, as their narrative meditations on boredom anticipated and subverted fin-de-siècle medical studies on attention. Their literary prescience resulted in the creation of innovative formal meditations on the dialectic between inside and out—a tension at the crux of modernity’s theorization.
His teaching embraces the multiliteracies framework, spiraling the study of grammar and French and Francophone culture throughout the levels with a focus on project-based learning. At Agnes Scott, he is currently teaching Intermediate French as well as a general education course: Leadership 101. His iteration of the course is entitled "Creativity and Leadership: What Makes Life Worth Living" and studies literary, philosophical, and psychological accounts of creativity to consider the ways in which artistic processes constitute a form of acting on the world. Before coming to Agnes Scott, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Emory for three years where he coordinated the Intermediate French curriculum and taught Elementary French I, Elementary French II, Intermediate French, Advanced French, French for Reading Comprehension, and Writing Skills. He also taught at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard, the Department of French and Italian at Miami (Oxford, Ohio), and was a Visiting Lecturer for three semesters in Madrid, Spain in the Complutense’s English Department.
Beyond the classroom, his interests include food and wine, plants, Ashtanga yoga, being in nature, and the 1970s.
Professional Activities
Publications
- "J.-K. Huysmans with Wilhelm Wundt: Ennui, or a Mind-Body Problem," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 51, no. 1, 2022, pp. 136-152
- "Flaubert's 'Travail Psychologique': The Value of Distraction." MLN, vol. 136 no. 4, 2021, pp. 805-826.