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 concerns all aspects of the history of New France, and its European ramifications. I am interested in the circulation of people, goods, knowledge and information between Native and French America and Europe (1660-1800). I am continuing my work on North American fur trade routes, in a hemispheric space extending from Native American lands eastward all the way to Asia.

A project on the circulation of knowledge considers natural history as a means of appropriation, for the moment through the work of Jean-François Gaultier (1708-1756), the King's physician in Quebec City and correspondent for the Académie royale des sciences.

I am also exploring the field of historiography and popular memory, and in particular the fate of the French Regime in Canada after the Conquest of 1759.