French Studies

Faculty Research

Our Faculty Bring their research into the classroom!

The strength of our French Studies program lies in an interdisciplinary approach that crosses geographical and linguistic borders. Our courses are inspired and enriched by original research conducted in the province, across the country and around the world by our department members.

Named "popular prof" from 2002 to 2006 in The Maclean's Guide to Canadian Universities, Canadian literature professor Kenneth MEADWELL regularly spends time in Paris reading the work of French semioticians and narratologists as he explores identity and alterity in the francophone novel. He invites you to explore with him in his classes various aspects of terminology, translation, literary analysis and literary theory, as well as of francophone Canadian literature. He might even reveal the identity of his favourite Parisian pâtissier. Les Éditions David (Ottawa) published in 2012 his critical work, Narrativité et voix de l'altérité. Figurations et configurations de l'altérité dans le roman canadien d'expression française.

Author of Les négresses de Baudelaire (1994), 19^th century literature specialist Joseph NNADI travelled throughout sub-Saharan Africa to meet women poets and gather their unpublished or out-of-print feminist poems into an anthology. You can read these rare gems and learn the stories behind them in FREN-3884/3 Francophone Black Feminist Literature.

Linguistics professor Liliane RODRIGUEZ does her travels on the back roads of Manitoba, visiting French and Métis towns to study the vocabulary of French-speaking children. She will share fascinating details about Manitoba French in FREN-3202/3 Géolinguistique française: Regional Varieties of French in Canada and the Francophone World as well as in FREN-3205/3 Studies in Bilingualism.

Recipient of the Clifford J. Robson Award for Excellence in Teaching (1986) and "Popular Prof" in The Macleans Guide to Canadian Universities (1996), Anne RUSNAK visits the National Library of Canada in Ottawa, the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec in Montreal as well as the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris to analyse the narrative patterns of francophone adolescent and children's novels published in Canada and in France. You can find out more about what she has discovered about the politics of francophone Canadian children's literature in FREN-2681/3 Children's Literature of French Canada.

Author of Le Pendule (1993), 17^th and 18^th century literature specialist Sante A. VISELLI travels to libraries in France and his native Italy where he studies the spread of ideas and ideology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and particularly, the influence of French authors on Italian literature and vice versa. He will share his insights into national stereotypes in FREN-3581/3 Eighteenth-Century Literature: Lumières et Révolution.