Faculty Profile

Jonathan Weiss

e-mail: jmweiss@colby.edu
tel.: 872-3125
office: Lovejoy 322

Jon Weiss is the NEH Class of 1940 Distinguished Professor of Humanities. He is a graduate of Columbia and Yale, and has been teaching at Colby since 1972. His interests include the literature of twentieth-century France and of Quebec; he has written two books on Quebec literature and edited a collection of essays on Quebec theater that won the 1996 ACSUS Manuscript Award. He recently completed a biography of the French novelist Irène Némirovsky, as well as a study of the eighteenth-century French libertine, Charles de Brosses. He has contributed articles to Études françaises and Quebec Studies, and most recently a piece of fiction to the Spanish review Escala.

Professor Weiss has been awarded two Fulbright fellowships (one to France and one to Canada), and has been on the executive board of the Association for Quebec Studies in the United States. He has given guest lectures at institutions in the United States and abroad.

From 1990 to 2000, Professor Weiss served Colby College as Associate Dean of Faculty and Director of Off-Campus Study; in this capacity, he founded the Colby Bates Bowdoin study center in London, England, in 1999.

French literature of the twentieth century, contemporary French culture and the history of French civilization are areas that Professor Weiss currently teaches. He also teaches French theater, and, has, with committed students, produced a play in French every year since 2002. He continues to direct Colby's program in Dijon, France, on a regular basis.

Professor Weiss is currently working on a book on American perceptions of France, and has recently given papers on that subject in Dijon and Paris.