Adam R. Rosenthal

Adam R. Rosenthal is Associate Professor of French and Global Studies at Texas A&M University. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University in 2014. His first book, Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida (Edinburgh University Press 2022), traces the expansive role of gifts and gift-giving in Western poetry, while his second book, Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life (University of Minnesota Press 2024), asks how philosophical, poetic, and religious tropes of immortality inform biological and transhuman notions of immortal and indefinite life. He has published essays in SubStance, Poetics Today, Oxford Literary Review, and MLN, is an Associate Editor for the journal Derrida Today, and co-organizes the “Humanities and Anthropocene Initiative” for Texas A&M’s Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. He is currently working on two projects. The first, Archives Organic and Inorganic: A New History of Life in Deconstruction, develops the implications of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida’s writings on history and the trace for understanding the relationship between life and nonlife. The second, Biophilology: Readings in the History of Life, argues that the life sciences are, at their core, philological disciplines, and attempts to realize a new biology, now as unrestricted philology of the living archive.