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.

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 I also sometimes collaborate on mounting exhibitions and producing historical documents for various audiences.

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 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 have taught the international history of Canada and Quebec at Université de Montréal since 2011. My goal as a historian is to use cultural and social history, as well as postcolonial studies, to obtain and promote a deeper understanding of the history of Canada and Quebec in the world, and the way in which their international activities (governmental and non-governmental) have shaped and been shaped by the lived experiences of the peoples living in the northern portion of North America. I employ international history to explore Canada and Quebec as projects of rule, while situating them and their populations in global currents.

My first book, With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms and the Canada-Québec-France Triangle, 1944-1970 (UBC Press, 2012), examines the complex triangular dynamic between Canada, Quebec and France by situating this in the broader currents of the history of globalization. It explores the concept of “nation” in an increasingly interconnected world, and parallel to this, the efforts to manage multiple overlapping identities. This monograph also is part of my ongoing effort to shed light on the question of “empire” in Canadian and Quebec history. These research interests also led to my co-editing a volume that offers and encourages a critical reinterpretation of Canadian international history through the prism of race Dominion of Race: Rethinking Canada’s International History (UBC Press, 2017). 

I also explore the history of settler colonialism in Canada and Quebec, as it is impossible to understand Canadian and Quebec international history without referring to the complex history of the relationships between Indigenous Peoples and settlers. This idea also underpins my current research project, an exploration of the entangled history of Canadian development assistance after 1945 and Indigenous-Canadian relations.

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.