Phillip John Usher

Phillip John Usher's research brings together the fields of Renaissance Studies and classical reception with certain theorists, thinkers, and practices of cultural geography and visual studies.

Philliip John Usher was born in England. He studied French literature at Royal Holloway College, University of London, UK, before pursuing graduate work in Romance Languages at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA. He is currently Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, where he is also Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Studies. A specialist of French Renaissance literature, he is the author of Errance et cohérence: Essai sur la littérature transfrontalière (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010), a book that one reviewer called “insightful and probing” for the way it “reflects on the key philosophical question of the period: the relation between self and other, part and whole, the particular and the universal” (Sixteenth Century Journal); and of Epic Arts in Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). He is also the author of an annotated translation of Ronsard’s Franciad (New York: AMS Press, 2010), called a “work of scholarship and a labor of love” (Renaissance Quarterly), and co-editor of Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), which Lee Fratantuono in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review called "an important contribution to the study of the intertext between Virgil and the art and literature of one of France's most justly celebrated centuries." Usher's research and reviews have appeared in journals such as L’Esprit créateur, the Revue des Amis de Ronsard, Romance Studies, Modern Language Notes (MLN), and elsewhere. He is also the founding editor of a new book series, “French Renaissance Texts in Translation” at AMS Press and Associate Director of Barnard College’s Center for Translation Studies. Professor Usher also sporadically writes about film.