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 I also sometimes collaborate on mounting exhibitions and producing historical documents for various audiences.

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.

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 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)