Cities are my main research topic. I study them through the history of their concrete and symbolic formation. I am interested in showing that the efforts involved in the physical organization of cities shape the way they are governed and help structure social and political relationships at this level. This way of seeing the history of cities as a product of interrelated physical and social factors has led to published papers on the development of public spaces for culture and recreation in Montreal and Toronto in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and on the structuring of the municipal domain through drinking water and wastewater networks. I recently published a paper on evolving relationships between Montreal and water, in an attempt to reconstitute the role of water and its successive transformations in the city's urbanization process since the early 19^th century. Since then I have been pursuing my work on the history of the environment at the larger scale of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence hydrographic system.

I am also interested in issues relating to the writing and public uses of history in theoretical and practical terms. I have taken part in various debates and roundtables on the teaching of history. I also sometimes collaborate on mounting exhibitions and producing historical documents for various audiences.

Following on my work on the history of women in the 18^th century, I have been studying theoretical gender issues and in particular the relationship between the public and private spheres at the time. Looking at the sociability of salonnières in France and Venice, I realized that this public/private distinction was difficult to maintain in reality.

My current research 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. I am also a member of the Interacting with Print research group.

I devoted the early years of my career to studying the seigniorial regime in Canada, the rural economy, farming families' material lives, social structures, and the family and family networks in rural Quebec in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. In recent years, in co-operation with other scholars, I have been pursuing research into local institutions, including parish fabriques, sedentary militias and school syndics, so as to better understand the ways in which elites were recruited and renewed in the pre-capitalist Quebec countryside.

My research interests concern the processes of reform and centralization in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire throughout the 19^th century (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, North Africa), from a cultural and social perspective. The central role of the press and associations in the emergence of a public space during the Arab Renaissance and the issues of education and citizenship in the colonial and post-colonial periods are central to my research.

At the same time, my work bears on the symmetrical processes of professionalization and the popularization of Islamic expertise in the 20^th century. More specifically, I am interested in the institutional and curricular development of mosque-universities such as al-Azhar, Zaytuna and Qarawiyyin, from the 18^th century until their nationalization in the 1960s, and also in the legacies and uses of Islamic historiography, philosophy and law in the contemporary period, particularly in nationalism and Islamism.

My current research aims to contribute to the cultural history of Arab nationalism and to define its key institutions: volunteer associations and secret societies; scouting movements; school textbooks.

I am interested in the people who lived in the St. Lawrence Valley in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, particularly under the British Regime. I want to determine the rules by which they lived, the images that shaped the way they perceived the world, and the power structures they created or suffered under. This curiosity has made me a historian of pre-industrial Quebec society. I began by studying how religious precepts legitimized certain conceptions of order. In the past few years, using documents left by other institutions, tribunals and educational institutions, I have tried to understand how social identities were formed, negotiated and mobilized.

I am a medical historian and specialize in Southeast Asia. I have been working for over 15 years on the development of health policy and practices from the 19^th century to the present, with a particular focus in recent years on the multiple "encounters" between Western (biomedicine) and so-called alternative and traditional forms of medicine. I am a determined advocate of a multidisciplinary, transnational approach, and recently developed projects and published on medications as a social object, immigrants' health practices and the identity of Vietnamese medicine.

I have held the Canada Research Chair in Healthcare Pluralism since 2007, and I work to improve our understanding of changes in health indicators in modern societies, over-medication and rejection of vaccination, as well as the enthusiasm for alternative medicine - all behaviours that are giving rise to increasing concern but also to different interpretations, which deserve to be revisited and examined from a historical perspective.

My research interests are as follows:

1. The history of the Soviet Union and the consequences of its dismantlement, in particular the history of science and intellectuals, the transformation of research systems and the de-modernization of post-Soviet societies and socio-economic polarization and other effects on societies outside the post-Soviet space. 
    
2. The contemporary history of Jews and the history of Zionism and the state of Israel, in particular the connections between the Zionist movement and the political right in the West, Jewish opposition to Zionism, the development of the Jewish identity since the turn of the 20^th century and the origins and spread of Christian Zionism.
    
3. Science and higher education as factors in international relations, in particular scientific exchanges, the internationalization of education and the role of scientists in international politics.

The themes of some recently completed and current theses and dissertations:

• History textbooks in three post-Soviet states
• The historiography of some Cold War conflicts
• Franco-Romanian relations: between tradition and necessity (1949-1974)
• Pro-Israeli activities in Canada
• Jewish political and religious opposition to Zionism

My research themes are as follows:

1. Intra-continental migrations (North America) and the immigration of Italians to Quebec
2. The history of cultural policies from a comparative perspective (United States/Canada/Europe)
3. The history of key concepts and their uses in the social sciences and government policies (assimilation; integration; incorporation; multiculturalism; inter-culturalism; transculturalism; diversity)
4. Cinematic narrations of the past (documentaries and feature films)