My work focuses on the notion of peace, its representation and conceptualization during the 20^thcentury. At the doctoral level I worked on the broad movement within the democracies that emerged as winners after the First World War, aimed at creating a lasting peace. My recent research, which looked at letters from “ordinary people” to political figures (Woodrow Wilson) and international organizations (League of Nations), examined the connections between citizenship, individual engagement and international relations. In my current research I am studying the social mobility and reintegration of French-Canadian veterans after the First World War.

Michael J. Carley is an expert on 20^th-century international relations and the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. His Research interests focus on relations between the Soviet Union and Western Europe and the United States between 1917 and 1945. He has written two books and some thirty papers and essays on French involvement in the Russian Civil War (1917-1921), Soviet relations with the Great Powers between the two world wars, issues of appeasement and the origins and conduct of the Second World War. He has been published in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy and Russia.

Professor Carley is working on two large projects. The first concerns the troubled relations between Soviet Russia/the USSR and the West from 1917 to 1930. His book, Silent Conflict: A Hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations, was published in late January 2014 by Rowman & Littlefield, in the US, and is available from Amazon and Indigo. It was recently recognized by the American magazine Choice as the Outstanding Academic Title, 2014 in Central and Eastern European history.

His second project deals with the origins and creation of the "Grand Alliance" against Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Work on this second title is progressing well, and the provisional title is A Near-Run Thing: The Grand Alliance of World War II.

My most recent monograph looks at Venetian salonnières (like Giustina Renier Michiel and Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi) and the men who attended their salons (like Ugo Foscolo, Ippolito Pindemonte and Melchiorre Cesarotti), in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. In particular, I have found that these salonnières drew on the roles they played in literary salons to offer themselves as cultural intermediaries in their publications, by simplifying the erudite writings of men of letters in their circle and making them accessible to a wider readership.

My current research concerns the impact of the expansion of commercial print in the nineteenth century on the posterity of Italian eighteenth-century "women worthies."

My research concerns the comparative history of identity construction in 16^th-18^th century Europe and the Americas, with a number of complementary aspects: the vision of the Other and the question of self (episteme and mentalities; objectives and methods of persuasion); the role of the two sexes in the individual and collective construction of identity; historical evidence and the memory of self. With regard to this first theme, I published Croire et faire croire. Les missions françaises au 17^e siècle(Paris, Fayard, 2003), showing the far-reaching connections between the perception of otherness and the representations of modern identity in the context of the first globalization, i.e. missionary imperialism, at a time when France was undergoing true domestic colonization. A second theme developed from this research, and allowed me to embark on two parallel publications: the first, Les autobiographies spirituelles et l'émergence du sujet moderne, is aimed at understanding how men and women in France and its colonies learned to see themselves as acting subjects. The second publication, the third of my research themes, is entitled Memoire de soi, mémoire des autres, and compares the annals of various religious congregations in France and New France to determine the traces that small communities wished to leave for posterity, sometimes at the cost of a certain distortion of the historical record. On the basis of this work, I was invited to edit a scientific history of the Sulpicians of Canada in which the chapters I wrote concern the duty of memory, identity markers, and relations between others and the Sulpicians, who were key figures in Montreal history (D. Deslandres, John A. Dickinson and Ollivier Hubert, eds. Les Sulpiciens de Montréal. Une histoire de pouvoir et de discrétion (Montreal, Fides, 2007). Along the same lines, I co-edited, with Raymond Brodeur and Thérèse Nadeau-Lacour, Lecture inédite de la modernité aux origines de la Nouvelle France. Marie Guyart de l'Incarnation et les autres fondateurs religieux (Quebec City, Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 2010) to mark the 400^th anniversary of Quebec City. I am currently writing a biography of Marie Guyart de l'Incarnation, founder of the very first school for women in America, while continuing my work on the roles of the sexes, religion and politics in the history of modern-day French expansion.

I publish, teach and supervise students at the Master's, PhD and post-doctorate levels in the field (or theme) of the history of international relations. I am interested primarily in France and the Arab world. I am a student and proponent of the "French School" of the history of international relations (HIR), which updated the study of the international phenomenon by including and integrating "deep forces" (economic, social, institutional, cultural, etc.) in the analysis. This approach generated a rich historiography whose originality transformed and reinvigorated the field of international history. This vitality is just as valuable today as it was yesterday in terms of questioning, investigating and discovering, as illustrated by the number of students doing their MA and PhD studies in HIR.

The issue that has intrigued me the most is the connections between the political and economic dimensions internationally. This question underpins many of my publications, in particular my work on Franco-Egyptian relations based on a doctorat d'État (I am among the last to have obtained this venerable diploma under the French university system, as it has now been replaced by the single dissertation). It led to a monograph, currently in printing, on the decolonization of French North Africa. In economic history, my interests focus on movements of capital, international trade and the history of businesses (banks, oil companies, electricity companies).

Since 2004 I have been a founding member and co-ordinator of the Groupement interuniversitaire pour l'histoire des relations internationales (GIHRIC). Along with research, I find teaching a real pleasure, as shown by the Award of Outstanding Achievement in Teaching I received early in my career from the Faculty of Arts and Science. The flame still burns brightly!