Lisa Gasbarrone

I began my career with a focus on the French Enlightenment. I wrote a dissertation on botany in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Happily, many (though not all) flaws of the thesis were ironed out in a series of articles that I published from the dissertation. With a focus still on the Enlightenment, I published an article on Diderot's philosophical dialogues ("Voices from Nature"). Since then, my work has taken a few turns. Post-tenure, I began to study 19th- and early 20th-century Quebec, with a focus first on historian François-Xavier Garneau and then on novelists (Lacombe, Conan, Gaspé, Hémon) from this period. Along the way, I published an article on Victor Hugo and the idea of the sacred in Les Misérables. Currently, my focus is on the sacred in early classics of Québécois fiction. My book manuscript, The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec, was recently published by McGill-Queen's University Press.