Jonathan P. Eburne is J. H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities at Washington University, having taught Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies at Penn State for twenty years (2005-2025).

Eburne’s teaching and research interests revolve around the histories and activities of experimental artistic groups and movements. He is first and foremost a scholar of the surrealist movement, the subject of his PhD thesis and first book, Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Cornell University Press, 2008). Though most familiar today as an art movement founded in 1920s Paris, “surrealism” in fact designates an ever-expanding repository of techniques, concepts, collective activities, and political commitments on which contemporary thinkers and artists continue to draw. One of the central projects of surrealism is to challenge the self-evidence of dominant ways of thinking, and Eburne’s broader body of scholarly work takes up this project in its methods of study, as much as in its topics.

Eburne is the author of three books and editor or co-editor of six others. His most recent book is Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), a book about the process of turning ideas into things, and vice-versa. He is also the author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), which received the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association.

His edited or co-edited books include The Cambridge History of Surrealist Poetry (with Anna Watz; Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Stacy Klein, An Alchemy of Living Culture: Collected Writings on Double Edge Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2025); The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons (with Benjamin Schreier; Indiana University Press, 2017); Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (with Catriona McAra; Manchester University Press, 2017);The Year’s Work in the Oddball Archive (with Judith Roof; Indiana University Press, 2016); and Paris, Modern Fiction, and the Black Atlantic (with Jeremy Braddock; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

He is currently working on several other projects, including a book on the value and global circulation of surrealism titled The Great Surrealist Bargain Basement and a history of anti-intellectualism provisionally titled “Purge: A Political History of Anti-Intellectualism.”

Eburne is committed to fostering intellectual life in and beyond the classroom and university settings. This work includes editorial and organizational work for scholarly associations, as well as more public-facing community work. He is founding co-editor (with Amy J. Elias) and former Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning ASAP/Journal, the journal of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Eburne has also edited or co-edited special issues of Modern Fiction Studies (2005), New Literary History (2011), African American Review (2009), Comparative Literature Studies (2014), Criticism (2015), and ASAP/Journal (2016, 2018, 2020). His is a founder and former acting President of ISSS: the International Society for the Study of Surrealism and was President of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present in 2014-2015. He is also the series editor of the “re:criticisms” and “Refiguring Modernism” book series at the Pennsylvania State University Press and the new, ISSS-affiliated “Surrealisms” book series at the University of Minnesota Press.

He is a founder and part of the volunteer team directing The Print Factory, an antiracist, feminist, and queer-inclusive nonprofit bookstore and culture space in central Pennsylvania, which opened its doors in November 2024 (www.printfactorybellefonte.org). Though his role in this organization has changed since moving to St. Louis, he continues to serve on the Print Factory’s board, while working to get involved in local cultural organizations in St. Louis.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Eburne received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 and did his undergraduate work at Dartmouth College. His parents, Timothy and Margaret Eburne, emigrated to the US from the United Kingdom in 1969. Jonathan is now a St. Louis enthusiast, and he lives in the Shaw neighborhood.