Jonathan Basile

• PhD (Comparative Literature), Emory University

Jonathan’s research examines contemporary upheavals in evolutionary theory in order to pose questions relevant to debates in fields of literary theory, continental philosophy, and science studies. Scientific knowledge depends on narrative structures and cultural inheritances that can be examined by reading scientific literature together with the narrative experiments of 20th-century fiction. In turn, this encounter sheds light on urgent concerns that transform the present self-conception of literary studies (under headings such as “ecocriticism” and “new materialism”), which often invoke biological and ecological crises as motivations for their reading practices.

He has two forthcoming books that develop this project. “Virality Vitality,” under contract with SUNY Press, examines the history and present of the life sciences, including synthetic virology, synthetic biology, and de-extinction, to demonstrate that viruses have played an unsettling role for the foundational concepts of the life sciences over the past century. “Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution,” under contract with University of Minnesota Press’s Posthumanities series, explores discourses of “cultural evolution” from Darwin to the present, to argue that the instabilities legible in these writings reverberate throughout the life sciences, compromising any clear delineation between the “two cultures” of science and the humanities.

As an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Philosophy, teaching in the IHPST, Jonathan will undertake a new project focusing on the fragmentation of evolutionary theory in the twenty-first century. Numerous authors have argued that the modern synthesis and the genetic paradigm fail to account for the complexity of evolutionary processes, but the competing theories that have emerged contain profound contradictions both mutually and internally (so to speak). While some have attempted to unite these disparate strands into an “extended evolutionary synthesis,” he will argue that the impossibility of theoretical synthesis is ineluctable and the driver of what we sometimes call scientific “progress.”