Research Axes and Working Groups

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• Indigeneity
• Gender and Power
• Trans-national identities
• Current Individual Projects

This axis investigates the constitution, the politics and the representation of national as well as individual identities in a trans-national context. More precisely, we seek a conceptualization of the discourse on identity that draws on a dynamic of relation across borders, ethnicities, and races. Framed by cultural-studies and post-colonial approaches, the forging of identity is tackled as a process of (re)-definition that involves rejection, acquisition or imitation of foreign social and cultural practices. Within this framework we analyze how displacement (forced or voluntary) informs the articulation of identities torn between external representation and subjective perceptions.

Current Individual Projects

Barker: My research on Anthony Burns shows how Antebellum blacks crossed borders, because of identity, to realize their rights. My current work on the return-migration of blacks to the US will focus on the motivations for their movement across geographic borders. Finally, research on Antebellum Virginia will likely reveal how free blacks and slaves constantly crossed borders and how whites viewed these border crossings as dangerous, disorderly, and disruptive.

Berco: My early work examined the malleable border between hierarchies constructed within sexual relationships and those publicly accepted. My current research on syphilis in early modern Spain focuses on how patients moved across the identity and cultural borders of illness and health, especially in their public personae. Finally, upcoming research on sorcery trials will examine the porous legal and cultural border between heresy and madness.

Boyer: My current research explores the meeting points of crime and sexuality in Weimar Germany literature. These literary texts render a distorted image of society in which accounts of sexual criminality figure as symptoms of crisis. The focus on the representation of criminal behaviour explores the gendered boundaries separating the "normal" from the "deviant", thereby applying to the axes of identity and gender.

Chainey Gagnon: My research on curation as civic engagement is framed by current debates in expology, public scholarship, and the new museology and is funded by FQRSC (2008-2010) and SSHRC Doctoral Fellowships (2010-2012). I am curating a series of experimental exhibitions that explore the social and political roles of museums, the construction of public memory, and the pedagogical possibilities in the exhibition as platform for civic engagement.

Charles: My current axes of research deal with the construction of personal identity according to Spinoza (1632-1677) and to French 17th century philosophers such as Malebranche and Lamy. This research unfolds on the levels of psychology (how mind and emotions make us who we are according to these authors) and physics (specifically the process of individuation in 17th century physics and Spinoza's contribution to theories relating to it).

Charpentier and Stout: Our research focuses on the underlying psychological factors shaping Quebecers' attitudes toward ethnic and religious groups. While social reciprocity seems to be one such factor, we are presently examining how socially constructed notions of cultural vulnerability and cultural identity play out in shaping the differing attitudes of Estrie Anglophones and Francophones toward immigrants.

Donnan: My research addresses the diversity of homeless people in Canada's centers. Credentials of recent immigrants to Canada are interpreted in a series of regulatory and social processes which create barriers to income. The bordering of indigenous peoples' identities into categories such as "Status and Non-Status Indian" creates a maze of regulation and disentitlement directly relevant to their opportunities to access affordable housing.

Dramé: My early research focused on colonization and decolonization and particularly French Imperialism in West Africa. Currently, I am examining Postcolonialism and Panafricanism as ideologies of unity and stability in the Africa. I'm also focusing on the construction of African frontiers, border disputes and tough interethnic relations that marked deeply the continent since its independence. This research fits into identity and Space/Geography, as well as the Indigeneity Studies working group.

Furlan: My research examines travel literature as a primary mean for the representation of "Self" and "Otherness". My research is relevant to this cluster because travelling means to cross borders, either physical or metaphorical. The encounter with a new and different culture has a key role in understanding how borders work: it tells us where borders are essential, when they are crucial to define identity and when we need to transcend them.

Grogan: My research considers how Thomas Paine's seminal "Rights of Man" (1791/2) challenged expectations about political discourse; challenges in terms of style, anticipated readership and subject matter. In breaking down class and national boundaries and crossing into numerous genres (polemic,cartoons, pamphlets, novels, government legislation) Paine's work offers a unique window into the political, social and economic realities of its time.

Harvey: My research deals with identity within political discourse. I have written on changing identity notions within French Canadian 19th century discourse. My current research addresses the same issues for the Anglophones of Lower Canada. My research also fits into the Culture axis. I have published extensively on the history of books and libraries and am currently working on a manuscript dealing with a radical library in Montreal at the mid 19th century.

Levasseur: My research on the 19th century includes various aspects of spatial, cultural and identity borders: Franco-Americans, printers, engravers, and writers who came from France, England and the US to work in Quebec, who published in French and/or in English, worked on newspapers in Ontario, Quebec and New England, writers who participated in the Gold Rush, travelers, and catholic and protestant clergy who worked both in the US and Quebec.

Malley: As a cultural study, my current research, conducted under the title "Digging up the Future: Archaeology in Contemporary Science Fiction" crosses many potential borders, ranging from the generic borders of archaeological methodology, theory and popular culture, to contemporary formations of geopolitics in historical narratives, to the cultural borders between East and West within science fiction and the "science fictions" of archaeological discourse.

Manore: My research fits within the identity and geography/space axes. I examine the legal and administrative borderlands that Aboriginal Peoples must navigate as they negotiate Euro-Canadian understandings of identity, citizenship, rights, culture and national borders and their own. Also within the environmental history stream, my research examines certain aspects of the borders between nature and society that have been historically created by Canadians.

Miller: My current research related to ancient Near Eastern magic focuses in part on its expression in the Hebrew Bible. Although "magic" is condemned in the Hebrew Bible, certain Israelite ritual practitioners perform acts, without reproach, that may be viewed as "magical." Practitioners' place within or outside normative Yahwism (their identity), rather than the phenomenology of acts and the cosmology underlying them, constitute a border that may explicate the understanding of "magic" by biblical writers.

Morra: My research examines how evolving national imaginings influenced Canadian women writers. At the turn of the 20th century, some women writers expressed delight in sublimation into a transcendent idea of citizenship. While such views gained them literary legitimacy, they paradoxically relinquished the very autonomous identity they had sought. This research relates to the crossing of gender boundaries as women strove for agency by entering male public spaces.

Murray: Part of my research examines how labelling women "magicians" in the late antique Jewish and Christian communities was a discursive strategy by those in power to construct social boundaries, gender roles and authority structures. My other research area pertains to the relationship among early Christians and Jews, particularly how Gentile believers in Jesus developed an identity and self definition apart from Judaism.

Tracy: My research examines the malleable border of legal personhood in ancient Rome, especially as seen in the practices of adoption, emancipation, and enslavement of Roman males. All these practices involved the superiority of legal (and male) authority over biology. How did Romans understand the biological (and female controlled) relationships, and did the artificial creation and nullification of kinships relate to Roman imperialism?

Tronsgard: My research agenda centres on contemporary Spanish literature and cultural studies. In particular, I am currently developing a project that explores the the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of emerging Spanish identities in works of narrative fiction and film. I concentrate on how matters of cultural inheritance resulting from collective historical experiences, such as the Franco dictatorship, relate to the less “traditional” and more transnational realities of Spain today.

Ugland: My research and teaching interests lie in the fields of Comparative Politics and Comparative Public Policy, with a focus on European and Scandinavian Politics, as well as on the relationship between Canada and Europe. My most recent research project examines the link between Jean Monnet – the father of the European Community – and Canada, and I have a book forthcoming in February 2011 with the University of Toronto Press entitled Jean Monnet and Canada: Early Travels and the Idea of European Unity.

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