Contact
Professor, Faculty of Arts - Modern Languages and Cultural Studies Dept
- dlafores@ualberta.ca
Overview
Area of Study / Keywords
Health & Medical Humanities; French Literature; Québec Culture & Literature; Film & Media Studies; Philosophy & Critical Theory
About
Daniel Laforest is Professor of French & Media Studies. He received his PhD in literary studies from l'Université du Québec à Montréal, and his MA in literature and film studies from Université Laval in Québec. After a two-year Fulbright postdoctoral tenure at the Center for Cultural Studies of the University of California Santa Cruz, he joined the University of Alberta in 2008. His teaching and research specializations are health & medical Humanities, Canadian studies (in French and English), Québec & French literatures, philosophy & critical theory, the interrelations of cinema and literature, as well as urban and media cultures. Those projects and area of activities have led him to do two separate artist residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity.
In Fall 2014 he was Visiting Professor on the Research Chair in Canadian Studies shared by the Universités de Limoges and Poitiers in France. In Winter/Spring 2015 he was Visiting Professor at the Center for Biomedical Ethics of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, with the Medicine & the Muse program. He is member of the editorial board of the academic journal BMJ Medical Humanities, as well as of the book series Nouvelles Études Québécoises at the Presses de l'Université de Montréal. He is co-founder of the online academic publication Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, launched in 2010. His first monograph, L'archipel de Caïn: Pierre Perrault et l'écriture du territoire received the Jean-Éthier Blais award for best essay on Quebec Studies. His second monograph, L'âge de plastique: Lire la ville contemporaine au Québec, was published in 2016 at Presses de l'Université de Montréal, and his third one, Topor et le cinéma, at Nouvelles Éditions Place in Paris in 2020.
Research
Daniel Laforest's SSHRC-funded research focuses on the interrelations between literary studies and health & medical Humanities, as well as on the growing impact of medical technologies of visualization on our capacity to tell stories about ourselves and our bodies. He is currently working on a monograph retracing the history of Medical Humanities in the West since the 1950s from the angle of literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.
Sample publications
- Daniel Laforest, Topor et le cinéma, Paris: Nouvelles éditions Place, coll. “le cinéma des poètes”, 2020, 128 p.
- Daniel Laforest, L’âge de plastique. Lire la ville contemporaine au Québec, Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016, 235 p.
- Daniel Laforest, L’archipel de Caïn. Pierre Perrault et l’écriture du territoire, Montréal: XYZ Éditeur, 2010, 302 p.
- Simonetta Sipione, Gillian Harvey, Daniel Laforest & Marilène Oliver (eds.), Connections: Bringing Neuroscience and Art Together, UofA Neuroscience & Mental Health Institute Publications, 2022.
- Marilène Oliver & Daniel Laforest (eds.), Dyscorpia: Future Intersections of the Body and Technology, UofA Art & Design Publications, 2020.
- Daniel Laforest, “La littérature et les humanités médicales : examen d’une tension irrésolue”, Tangence, no 125, 2021.
- Daniel Laforest, “Medical Biometrics and the Narrative Self”, PUBLIC journal, no 60, 2020.
- Daniel Laforest, “La santé publique et la violence des proportions dans le roman”, @nalyses journal, vol. 14, no 2, 2019.
- Daniel Laforest, “The Emotional Geographies of Quebec Cinema”, in William Straw & Janine Marchessault (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema, Oxford University Press, 2019.
- Daniel Laforest, Guy Clermont & Bertrand Rouby (eds.), Reading the Biomedical Body from the perspective of Canadian Literature, Presses Universitaires de Limoges, France, 2016.
- Daniel Laforest, “The Satellite, the Screen, and the City : On Google Earth and the Life Narrative”, International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 19. No 6, 2016.
Courses
DH 510 - Topics in Digital Theory and Culture
FREN 468 - Topics in Quebec/French Canadian Literature
3-0-0). Prerequisite: 6 units from: FREN 301, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 333.
MLCS 399 - Special Topics
Course may be taken five times when topics vary.