Micah True, PhD

About

Prior to coming to the University of Alberta, I taught briefly at Tulane University in New Orleans and at Duke University in North Carolina, where I completed my graduate work. I earned a PhD in Romance Studies from Duke, focusing on French literature and culture, with a dissertation on Jesuit missionaries' efforts to describe the Indigenous cultures they encountered in early French America. I also earned a MA from Duke, and before that a BA in French and journalism from Gonzaga University in Washington State. My off-campus interests include running, cooking, and reading campus novels.

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Research

I study early-modern French and Francophone literature, history, and folklore, with particular emphasis on contact between cultures.

I have a longstanding research interest in the writings of missionaries and other colonists in North America, especially in relation to the Indigenous cultures they encountered there. My newest book in this vein is The Jesuit Relations: A Biography (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025). It was preceded by The Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s (1682–1761) Journal of a Voyage in North America: An Annotated Translation (Brill, 2019) and Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France (McGill-Queen's UP, 2015). I am now in the early stages of an edition and translation of an anonymous account of a pirate voyage to the West Indies in the early seventeenth century and a new monograph about early-modern medicine as it relates to the Jesuit mission in New France, Indigenous healing practices, and approaches to treating cancer in France. 

I have a secondary research interest in seventeenth-century France's rich literary traditions—particularly theatre—as they intersected with its colonial projects in what is today eastern and maritime Canada. I am interested both in performances of French plays in colonial Quebec and Acadia and in the ways in which France's efforts to colonize the New World may have influenced some of the period's best-known works of literature. My work in this field has appeared in well-respected journals like French Studies and French Forum.

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Teaching

I welcome the opportunity to work with qualified and motivated graduate students in any of my research fields: North American Francophonie and folklore, early modern French literature and culture (16th-18th centuries), intercultural contact in the French Americas, and travel writing.

Micah True

2025 June;

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Micah True

French Studies. 71 (1):1-14

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Micah True

French Forum. 43 (3):391-405

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Micah True

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Micah True