FACULTY

Professor. B.A., Political Science, Dickinson College; M.A. and Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Indiana University.

Jon Thiem is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Colorado State University. He has lived in Colorado for twenty-five years. He grew up in southern Delaware, graduated from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and taught two years as a Peace Corp volunteer in Ghana, West Africa. In 1975, he received his doctorate in Comparative Literature from Indiana University.

Thiem's scholarly research has focused on two areas: a. the figure of the intellectual and the theme of anti-intellectualism in European literature; and b. the mythos of the epigone (translator, biographer, reader) in postmodern fiction - as in his essay “Intertextual Lives: the Novel of Biographical Quest as a Postmodern Genre,” Sincronie III, 5 (Milano, 1999). Other essays have appeared in Comparative Literature, The Journal of the History of Ideas, Cadmos, Translation and Literature, and The Dictionary of Literary Themes.

His books include Lorenzo de’Medici: Selected Poems and Prose (Penn State Press, 1991), short-listed for the Columbia Translation Center Prize, and Real Life: Ten Stories of Aging (University Press of Colorado, 1994), an anthology of fiction edited in collaboration with Patrick McKee.

With Ralph Slotten and Bettie Anne Doebler, he has published two volumes of poetry: Book of the Mermaid, (Sutter House, 2001), and Nine Waves (Sutter House, 2003).

His latest project (in progress) is a work of creative non-fiction examining the lives of three settlers in the Northern Colorado mountains and their intimate relation to the land.

Phone: 970 491 5796
Email Address: jthiem@lamar.colostate.edu