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.

I joined the department in 2017, after eleven years as a professor of international relations and American studies at the University of Ottawa's School of Political Studies. I'm happy to see my interdisciplinary inclinations find new ground via communication and media studies and to have been able to start a new chapter teaching international communication, political and media communication and popular culture, with a focus on war, infrastructure, mobility, power and media. I'm also in charge of the faculty's graduate programs in international studies, where I teach a course on the historical and contemporary role and place of the United States in the world, or the compulsory course on contemporary issues and debates in international studies.

Through communication, we are, consciously or unconsciously, in touch with the world, and I'm particularly interested in our relationship with digital governance - and by extension, digital media. I therefore pay particular attention to communication infrastructures, which leads me to study data and the new forms of control that the surveillance society puts into action in the digital age. As digital media, algorithms then become a favorite subject to better grasp both the media infrastructures of communication they embody and what they make possible as media technologies governing subjects and controlling spaces.

My current work focuses on technologies for controlling mobilities (circulation of people, capital, goods and digital data) involved in managing security risks in the digital context of Big Data, particularly with regard to borders, surveillance and governance. Thus, my research and teaching in international and political communication focus on the role of socio-technical infrastructures, power dynamics, actors, digital platforms, algorithms, artificial intelligence and the political mechanisms and modalities mobilized by contemporary forms of war, security and policing in the North American context. Finally, I maintain a constant research watch on the United States' preparation for war, with all that this implies in terms of the power of imagination, security and socio-technical imaginaries, innovation and research practices for the future of warfare, and the identity-related weight of cutting-edge technology for the American national security state apparatus.

More broadly, my research is divided into three strands: 1) the surveillance of mobility and algorithmic security, war (and its issues of disinformation and information) and the technopolitical infrastructures governing North American border spaces; 2) the relationship between war and society, the militarization of everyday life and the culture of the national security state in the United States; and 3) popular culture and American media cultures, with a focus on war and surveillance on the small and big screens.

In communications and international studies, I am well served by my interdisciplinary openness and indisciplinary perspective, which draws on the fields of international relations, geography and political anthropology, international political sociology, American studies, security studies and science, technology and society studies.

At the Université de Montréal, I divide my research time between the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (CÉRIUM), the Laboratoire Culture populaire, connaissance et critique (CPCC), the Laboratoire de recherche sur la technologie, l'activisme et la sécurité (LarTAS) and the Centre international de criminologie comparée (CICC). I am also a research associate at the Observatoire international sur les impacts sociétaux de l'intelligence artificielle et du numérique (OBVIA) and a research associate at UQAM's Canada Research Chair on the Secure Governance of Bodies, Mobility and Borders (GSCMF).

My research interests concern the processes of reform and centralization in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire throughout the 19^th century (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, North Africa), from a cultural and social perspective. The central role of the press and associations in the emergence of a public space during the Arab Renaissance and the issues of education and citizenship in the colonial and post-colonial periods are central to my research.

At the same time, my work bears on the symmetrical processes of professionalization and the popularization of Islamic expertise in the 20^th century. More specifically, I am interested in the institutional and curricular development of mosque-universities such as al-Azhar, Zaytuna and Qarawiyyin, from the 18^th century until their nationalization in the 1960s, and also in the legacies and uses of Islamic historiography, philosophy and law in the contemporary period, particularly in nationalism and Islamism.

My current research aims to contribute to the cultural history of Arab nationalism and to define its key institutions: volunteer associations and secret societies; scouting movements; school textbooks.

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.