Thomas Franck is Assistant Professor of French Linguistics at Ghent University. He is qualified by the French National Council of Universities (CNU) in sections 7 and 9. Prior to this appointment, he completed his PhD at the University of Liège (2015–2019), during which he undertook a research fellowship at Humboldt University of Berlin and the Akademie der Künste (2017–2018), within Rahel Jaeggi’s Research Center for Practical Philosophy, Social Philosophy, Human Studies, and Social Change. His work there focused on the Theodor W. Adorno Archives and on French intellectual journals (Arguments, Les Temps Modernes, Critique, Socialisme ou barbarie, Communications...), approached through the lenses of intellectual history, cultural transfer, and discourse analysis.
Following the completion of his PhD, he held academic appointments at the University of Luxembourg (2020-2025), at the University of Lille (2024-2025) and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Liège (2024–2025), focusing on the mythologies underpinning the notion of "energy transition" in the written press. He is a member of the Centre de Sémiotique et Rhétorique (CESERH) and a research associate at the University of Liège.
His research is grounded in discourse analysis, rhetorics and enunciative linguistics, with particular emphasis on the interplay between discourse, materiality and ideology – both its explicit manifestations and, more profoundly, its implicit dimensions. His research examines the materiality of discourse across diverse media – intellectual journals, daily press, digital materialities and some literary discourse – conceived as periodic, fragmented, and inherently reproductive forms that shape the circulation and reiteration of ideas. Within this framework, informed by Frankfurter Schule, he has examined literary discourse (as in Lecture phénoménologique du discours romanesque. Rhétorique du corps dans le roman existentialiste et le Nouveau Roman, Lambert-Lucas, 2017), philosophico-artistic discourse (Le Philosophe dans l’atelier. Sartre et Giacometti en miroir, Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2021), and intellectual discourse (Adorno en France. La constellation Arguments comme dialogue critique, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2022). He is currently co-authoring a forthcoming volume with François Provenzano, Discours et contre-pouvoir. Pour des rhétoriques critiques et situées, to be published by Hermann in 2026.
He serves as Assistant Editor for Language & History (Taylor & Francis) and his scholarly work has appeared in such journals as French and Francophone Studies, Argumentation et Analyse du discours, Rhetor: Journal of the Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric, Le Français aujourd’hui, and Interférences littéraires, among others.