Profile

An expert in identity constructs, Jocelyn Létourneau is suspicious of self-reconstructions done after the fact. If asked to pinpoint the event that triggered his academic career, instead of mentioning one revelation, he will talk about an accumulation of small, everyday events, such as crossing the campus of Laval University with his family in the late 1960s and his eagerness to attend as a student. He will then mention the encouragement he received from wonderful professors who helped him follow his already unconventional path.

Today, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Contemporary Political History and Economy in Quebec and a full professor with Laval University's Department of History, he is also a researcher with the Centre interuniversitaire d'études sur les arts, les lettres et les traditions. The current research project of this expert in the economic and social history of 20th century Quebec is a historical and narrative analysis of identity narratives and collective representations in the field of scholarly and popular history. Jocelyn Létourneau is also a regular guest of forums, symposia and conferences in Canada and abroad.

Elected to the Academy of Science of the Royal Society of Canada in 2004, he has been a visiting professor at the University of West Brittany in France, at the Doctoral School of Eastern Europe in Romania, and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the Université de Paris 13 in France, and a fellow at the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung of Bielefeld University in Germany and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. He is the author of a number of books, the most recent being Le Québec, les Québécois: un parcours historique (2004). He is also spearheading an extensive research project on the theme of "Canadians and their Pasts."

Yet this prestigious intellectual path does not prevent him from also feeling a sense of duty to become involved in the community and use his skilful, quick and incisive pen to express his unique and powerful ideas. For a number of years, Jocelyn Létourneau has had a major role in the discussions surrounding Québec.

Biography

Jocelyn Létourneau is a professor with the Department of History, a researcher at CELAT (Centre interuniversitaire d'études sur les lettres, les arts et les traditions) and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Contemporary Political History and Economy in Quebec at the Université Laval. A Fellow of the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung of Bielefeld University between 1994 and 1995, he is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was a Fellow between 1997 and 1998. Elected in 2004 to the Academy of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada, he is a graduate of the Université Laval and the University of Toronto. Invited many times as a professor to foreign universities, he sits on the advisory committees of several scholarly journals.

A prolific author, Jocelyn Létourneau, alone or jointly, has written or directed several works on his preferred topics: the production of a common sense of identity within complex societies, the uses of history in public interlocution, the historical consciousness of young people in a globalization context, the identity status of Quebeckers, etc. Among his publications, what specifically comes to mind is Passer à l'avenir : Histoire, mémoire, identité dans le Québec d'aujourd'hui (2000), which earned him the prix Spirale de l'essai in 2001, and Le Québec, les Québécois : un parcours historique (2004), a small book dedicated to the public that accompanies the permanent exhibition entitled "Le temps des Québécois" at the Museum of Civilization in Quebec. Recently, he published Que veulent vraiment les Québécois? Regard sur l'intention nationale au Québec (français), d'hier à aujourd'hui (Boréal, 2006).

Having received his education at the Laval University and the University of Toronto, Professor Létourneau is currently in charge of a university/community research alliance, which will enable him to collect data on the ways that Canadians interact with the past and build a historical identity for themselves. Jocelyn Létourneau frequently gets involved in public debates, particularly on sensitive and controversial issues affecting the relationships linking history, memory and identity in the (re)construction of the City.

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