Jacques Ehrmann

As full professor he taught there in the French and Comparative Literature Departments and edited three issues of the "Yale French Studies" review which were later published as books. He was very involved in academic activities including lectures, conferences, and colloquia ... and continued to work through a long illness until his premature death on 11 June 1972.

Concurrently working as a freelance correspondent for France Presse he was offered a full-time assignment in New York City at the same time as he was invited to join the Yale University Faculty. Having to choose between journalism and academia, he chose Yale University in 1961. He lived in Hamden, Connecticut, with his wife and two sons.

He left two sons, Guillaume, born 24 February 1959 and Laurent, born 27 December 1961.

In 1956 he married Françoise Laborie and the couple moved to Los Angeles where he attended The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and received a PhD in French Literature in 1961. There he met and befriended Raymond Federman with whom he perfected his tennis game. From 1959 to 1961 he taught at Pomona College in Claremont California while completing his doctoral dissertation.

He was called to military service from 1953 to 1955 and served in the "Régiment de Tirailleurs Algériens", and later as a translator in Germany for the US headquarters. During this time he met Pierre Riboulet who would go on to create the French architectural firm l'Atelier de Montrouge with Gérard Thurnauer (1926) and Jean-Louis Véret (1927) with whom he became lifelong friends while furthering his deep interest in Architecture.

The family, including his older brother Jean-Daniel (JD), came back to Paris in 1939 and he graduated from the Lycée Henri IV with a Baccalauréat in 1949, then studied at the Sorbonne where he obtained a Licence-des-Lettres in 1953. In the meantime, he received a Fulbright scholarship and spent an academic year from 1951 to 1952 at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, the "City of Colleges, Cows and Contentment", a logo he loved to quote.

Jacques Ehrmann (31 March 1931 – 11 June 1972) was a French literary theorist and a faculty member of the Yale University French Department from 1961 until his death in 1972.

Jacques Ehrmann was born in Mulhouse (Haut-Rhin, France) on 31 March 1931, the son of Paul Ehrmann and Henriette Weber. Born in the Alsace region by a twist of fate, as both the Ehrmann and Weber families were originally from Alsace but had left after the 1871 loss to Germany, it just happened that Mulhouse, then Strasbourg, were the first assignments of his father, an Engineering graduate from "École Polytechnique".