The JHI is excited to announce our 2024-25 Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellow—Julien Lefort-Favreau. He will join us in July 2024 during our theme year Undergrounds/Underworlds.
Julien Lefort-Favreau is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies and in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University. His main publications are Pierre Guyotat politique (2018) and Le luxe de l'indépendance. Réflexions sur le monde du livre (2021). His research focuses on political and economic changes in the publishing market, as well as the environmental impact of the book industry. He is interested in a range of phenomena, from Julie Doucet’s zines, to the effects of gentrification on independent bookshops, and the tensions between materialist and essentialist feminism in French publishing in the 1970s. His research is resolutely interdisciplinary, at the crossroads of book history, the sociology of publishing and the political economy of creative economies. His work is published in academic journals in Canada, the United States and Europe. He has also published articles for the general public in Liberté, Nouveau Projet, and is regularly invited in the media as a publishing industry expert.
Fellowship Project
Notes from the Underground: Invisibility and Bibliodiversity in the Publishing Industry
This project seeks to offer a counter-portrait of Canadian publishing by interviewing various players in the publishing industry and bookstores, whose work remains relatively invisible to the public. The aim is to examine the censorious effects of the book market, to see how radical ideas circulate in the underground, outside the circuits marked out by the laws of supply and demand and political neutrality. Book publishing is a central issue for freedom of expression and brings into play tensions concerning the very definitions of public space, and this is what this project interrogate: Can a publication be radical, rejecting the regime of visibility imposed by market parameters, and yet have a social and political impact? How can one work on the political radicalism that underlies its publications, while maintaining a sufficient degree of visibility to create a community?
About this Fellowship
The Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellowship is intended to foster knowledge exchange between the academy and the public. It is a component of the Jackman Humanities Institute’s research commitment to public scholarship, discussion, debate, and examination across multiple media platforms.