The Canadian Center is currently hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Center for International Studies and Research (CERIUM) of the Université de Montréal (UdeM). The launch officially took place on October 8 & 9 in 2015, during the first international conference organized by the Center ("Canada-Quebec-Caribbean: Trans-American connexions").
Discover the thesis in 180 seconds of Julie AGU, coordinator of the Canada center (2023-2026), PhD student at the Université Aix-Marseille (ED 354)
PhD Dissertation topic: "Self-narratives and lesbian metaphors in Canadian and American queer literature from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first century" under the direction of Nicolas Pierre BOILEAU and Lianne MOYES
Julie Agu's research focuses on the question of queer life-writing and its metaphors, particularly the study of the tradition, or even the injunction, imposed on sexual minorities/non-normative sexualities to adopt the autobiographical genre. She aims to examine how contemporary North American lesbian life-writing fits into or breaks free from this tradition within a specific historical, theoretical, and political context (the influence and legacy of "testimonial literature" and "HIV and AIDS testimonies/memoirs" in the 1980s and 1990s), drawing on feminist and queer literary studies and contemporary metaphor theories. Julie Agu offers to use an innovative methodology that combines metaphor studies and queer studies to analyze her primary and secondary sources throughout her thesis, making metaphor both an object of study and a distinctly queer literary analytical tool applied to her corpus. In doing so, she intends to pay significant attention to the literary strategies of resistance and subversion employed, through queer metaphorical language, against the invisibility/invisibilization and silence surrounding women's and homosexual writing within the scope of this study.
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