Biography:
John Vignaux Smyth grew up in Scotland, got a B.A. and M.A. from Clare College, Cambridge University in England, and subsequently studied at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1982, with a dissertation supervised by Barbara Herrnstein Smith (and second reader Paul de Man at Yale). The dissertation was nominated by the University of Pennsylvania as the best national dissertation in the humanities between 1982 and 1984. His first book, A Question of Eros: Irony in Sterne, Kierkegaard, and Barthes (1986) was the first in a Florida State University Press series on Kierkegaard, and was nominated for the James Russell Lowell, the René Wellek, and the Harry Levin prizes. His second book, titled The Habit of Lying : Sacrificial Studies in Literature, Philosophy, and Fashion Theory, and solicited for Duke University Press by Stanley Fish (Duke UP, 2002), was also nominated for the James Russell Lowell prize. He was a main speaker (with Brian Rotman, Arkadi Plotnitsky, and Andrew Pickering) at a Duke University conference titled Mathematics and Post-Classical Theory in 1993, and co-speaker at a symposium on Music at King’s College, Cambridge (with Slavoj Zizek) in 1995.
Having in the twenty-first century written and published on Kafka, John Maynard Keynes, Italo Svevo, Diderot, Isak Dinesen, Adorno, Slavoj Zizek, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, and others – including an essay on “Originality in the Enlightenment and Beyond” (Routledge, 2008), on “Economics and Liquidity in Keynes and Svevo” (Western Humanities Review, 2011), and in Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 2014) - Smyth has more recently been lead researcher at the Portland Center for Public Humanities in an international collaboration funded by the Mellon Foundation between intellectuals in Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Tucson, and Utrecht titled Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging. He authored an index entry titled Science, presented at Utrecht University in Holland in December 2015, and published by Duke University Press in 2021. Along with Dr. Michael Clark of PCPH, he invited Slavoj Zizek and Jean-Pierre Dupuy to speak in filmed dialogue at PSU on Halloween 2014 in front of 800 people (spooky!!), and again the next morning in a more intimate interview. Other work includes an essay, solicited by Parallax (Leeds, UK) for a collection on lying and deception, titled “Deception, Concealment, Discretion: Forms of the Modern Sacred and Profane” (2015), and a review of Alain Badiou’s Plato’s Republic, as well as Animal Acts, a collection of performance pieces and commentaries dealing with animals.
His most recent work is Mock Ritual in the Modern Era, co-authored with Reginald McGinnis, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2022; and he is currently working, in collaboration with Francesco Rabissi, on a new translation and critical edition of Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno sollicited by Dan DeWeese, editor of Propeller Press.
Smyth taught for 13 years in the Literature and Languages Division at Bennington College in Vermont, was Head of English at Northeast Louisiana University from 1995-8, and Chair of English at PSU from 1998-2003. On the PSU faculty since 1998.