Antoine Traisnel is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Michigan. He holds doctorates in American Literature from Université Lille 3 (2009) and Comparative Literature from Brown University (2013). His published books, essays, and translations span the fields of American, French, and German Literature; critical and literary theory; biopolitics and ecocriticism. He is author of: Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (U Minnesota Press, 2020); Donner le change: L’impensé animal (Hermann, 2016), co-written with Thangam Ravindranathan; Hawthorne: Blasted Allegories (Aux Forges de Vulcain, 2015). He is the translator of Sheppard Lee (Aux Forges de Vulcain, 2017).

His recent and current research examines cultural and literary works through the lens of biocapitalism and extinction. It explores the historical, aesthetic, and philosophical footholds of the administration of life, concerns made all the more urgent in our present of escalating necropolitical and environmental crises. He co-leads the Critical Futures Project, a research collective that explores theoretical methods for addressing the new urgency of climate change under digital and racial capitalism.

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Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Cultural and Critical Theory in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University (2013-15).