Conley studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media.
Books include Action, Action, Action: The Early Cinema of Raoul Walsh (Albany: SUNY Press, “Horizons of Cinema” Series, 2022), À fleur de page: Voir et lire le texte de la Renaissance (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), Film Hieroglyphs (1991, new edition 2006), The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern Writing (1992), The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (1996, new edition 2010), L’Inconscient graphique: Essai sur la lettre à la Renaissance (2000), Cartographic Cinema (2007), and An Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Early Modern France (2010).He has published Su realismo (Valencia, 1988), a critical study of Las Hurdas (Luis Buñuel, 1932). His translations include Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1988 and 1992), and the same author’s Capture of Speech (1997) and Culture in the Plural (1997); Marc Augé, In the Metro (2003) and Casablanca: Movies and Memory (2009); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993); Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map (2006); and other authors. Among his 250 articles and book-chapters are contributions to The History of Cartography 3:The European Renaissance, Cinema and Modernity, Michael Haneke, The Epic Film, Film Analysis, Opening André Bazin, Burning Darkness: A Half-Century of Spanish Cinema, Film, Theory and Philosophy, European Film Theory, etc.
Conley and his wife, Verena Conley, were Faculty Deans at the Kirkland House, 2000-2020, where he taught the Kirkland Wine Seminar (2005-20) for graduating seniors and friends of Harvard.
Tom Conley was also the Study Leader on our recent Harvard Alumni Tour, the wines of Bordeaux and Rioja (October 2018).
Conley has been Fellow in Residence in the Garden & Landscape Division of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Center (Washington, D.C.) 2015-16, Visiting Scholar in residence at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Center (Washington, D.C.), spring 2022, Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Research, 2011-12, co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture (2025), co-editor of the Wylie-Blackwell Companion to Jean-Luc Godard (2014), and he was elected to The American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2016). He has held visiting appointments at the University of California-Berkeley, UCLA, the Graduate Center of the City Univeristy of New York, L’Ecole de Chartes, L’Ecole en Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and other institutions. In 2003 he was a seminar leader at the School for Critical Theory (Cornell). Awards include the Berlin Prize and fellow in residence at the American Academy of Berlin, spring 2020, and fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a member of the Modern Language Association, The International Association for the History of Cartography, the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, and the United Handball Association.
A staunch Red Sox fan, Conley also practices the art of handball at the Central Y in Boston and always looks forward to harvesting wild rice growing on the edges of rivers in Northern Minnesota.