At the installation ceremony, Eburne gave a talk entitled “What is a Question?”
Jonathan Eburne was installed as the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities on Thursday, April 16, 2026.
The program included a welcome from Feng Sheng Hu, the Richard G. Engelsmann Dean of Arts & Sciences and Lucille P. Markey Distinguished Professor, and remarks from J. Dillon Brown, associate chair of the Department of English. Hu performed the installation and medallion presentation.
In his remarks, entitled “What is a Question?” Eburne discussed the importance of surrealism both in 20th-century Paris and today. The comparative literature, French and Francophone studies professor, who founded an inclusive bookstore and creative space in his previous home of central Pennsylvania, also stressed the importance of asking shared questions as a community-building experience.
“It’s incumbent upon us to work together to create, sustain, and rebuild means and spaces that feed culture work and enable the flowering of creativity and imagination,” he said.
Hu praised Eburne’s work as a strong reflection of interdisciplinary excellence. “Jonathan has long showcased one of our top values in Arts & Sciences, and that is challenging our understanding of the concepts that shape our world.”
About Jonathan Eburne
Jonathan P. Eburne is J. H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities at WashU, having taught comparative literature, and French and Francophone studies at The Pennsylvania State University for 20 years before arriving at WashU in the fall of 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 doctoral 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 the 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). He is a founder and former acting president of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) and was president of The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) 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 anti-racist, feminist, and queer-inclusive nonprofit bookstore and cultural space in central Pennsylvania, which opened its doors in November 2024. 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 as well.
Born and raised in Massachusetts, Eburne earned his doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 and completed his undergraduate work at Dartmouth College. His parents, Timothy and Margaret Eburne, emigrated to the United States from the United Kingdom in 1969. Jonathan is now a St. Louis enthusiast, and he lives in the Shaw neighborhood with his wife, Hester Blum, the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English. Their adult child, Al Eburne, is a student at Bard College in upstate New York.
About J.H. Hexter
This professorship was one of four established in 1997 by a grant from the Danforth Foundation to recognize distinguished humanities faculty and to support the field. These professorships are not designated for any single department; they are used in areas that bridge multiple fields of interest.
For more than 60 years, Jack Hexter, a specialist in British history, conducted research and taught at major American universities, including Queens College, Yale University, and WashU.
He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cincinnati and master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. Professor Hexter began his scholarly career in 1941 with “The Reign of King Pym” and demonstrated his brilliance as a critic with “Reappraisals in History” (1961) and “On Historians” (1979). His academic career was filled with numerous prestigious scholarly appointments, including four Guggenheim and two Fulbright fellowships. He was a member of the Royal Historical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and a trustee of the Danforth Foundation from 1973 to 1978.
At age 76, Professor Hexter founded and directed the WashU Center for the History of Freedom, where he held an endowed professorship. He launched a major scholarly effort to chronicle the history of modern freedom. Professor Hexter died in 1996.
