The JHI is excited to announce our 2026-27 Critical Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow—Chloé Brault. She will join us in July 2026 for our theme year Doubles, Doppelgangers.
Chloé Brault completed her PhD in comparative literature at Stanford University in 2025, and her MA in comparative literature and book history and print culture at University of Toronto in 2016. She is a scholar of French and Francophone literature, multilingual digital humanities, and critical race and gender studies. She was previously a Digital Humanities Fellow at Stanford's Center for Textual and Spatial Analysis, a Mellon Sawyer Graduate Dissertation Fellow in the digital humanities, and a member of Stanford's Literary Lab. Her manuscript is tentatively titled Blackness in White Francophone Quebec.
Fellowship Project: Where is the World for Quebec?
Where is the World for Quebec? examines white Francophone Quebec's imaginative geography and how coloniality shaped claims to blackness and global solidarity from the 1960s to 1990s. During the separatist movement's rise and fall, writers positioned Quebec as Latin America's northern pole, compared it to Cuba, and imagined kinship with Martinique. The project terms these "colonial hallucinations," anxious attempts to articulate an independent Quebec's place in the world through recursive logic: oppressed = colonized = Black. White Francophone Quebec claims oppression by invoking colonized status, which calls upon blackness as colonialism's putative foundational marker. Third World localities become placeholders, overwriting Quebec's whiteness and settler colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples, endlessly circulating colonialism.
About this Fellowship
The Critical Digital Humanities Postdoctoral 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.