Julien Lefort-Favreau is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies and in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University. His research focuses on political and economic changes in the publishing market, as well as the environmental impact of the book industry. He is interested in a range of phenomena, from Julie Doucet’s zines, to the effects of gentrification on independent bookshops, and the tensions between materialist and essentialist feminism in French publishing in the 1970s. His fellowship research project is titled Notes from the Underground: Invisibility and Bibliodiversity in the Publishing Industry. Julien is our 2024-25 Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellow.
What are your main research interests and what excites you most about them?
All my research over the past ten years has been devoted to the political issues at stake in the publishing sector in Canada and France. A book is simultaneously an object of exchange and an object of litigation. Over the years, I have become interested in various publishing houses, particularly small presses. I aim to develop tools for critical reflection about bibliodiversity and the role of books in a plural democracy. Under what institutional, economic, legal, and symbolic rules do ideas circulate? I've written about several topics, including book ecology, feminist publishing, Julie Doucet's zines (check out her work; it's cool!) and corporate censorship. I work with book historians, sociologists, and people working in the book industry (booksellers, publishers).
I love books: both their content (I trained as a literary scholar, after all, and am an avid reader of fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, and children’s books) and the object itself (its graphic design), the places where they can be found, and the people who dedicate their lives to making them.
What project are you working on at the JHI and why did you choose it?
This year, I decided to delve into the history of Coach House Books, a publisher based on bpNichol lane, located 220 metres from the JHI, and whose archives are deposited at Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (450 m). It’s a local project! I'm particularly interested in the presence of Quebec literature in this publisher’s catalogue. My work on Coach House is laying the groundwork for a larger project on public policies in the book sector in Canada (French and English), what I call, waiting for a better expression, print nationalism.
How has your JHI Fellowship experience been so far?
JHI is a utopia in a dystopian world. The JHI community (staff and fellows) is incredibly generous and joyful - the pure joy of thinking together without competition or the pressure of productivity. What's more, I love the immersion in Toronto life, its cafés, but above all, its libraries, and bookstores!
Why do you believe the humanities are important?
The humanities are currently under threat from all sides, hence the crucial importance of a place like JHI. (Let’s not forget science is also in a precarious situation.) I'm wary of virtuous pleas in favour of the humanities. But I would say that I firmly believe in the public humanities. The role of the humanities is not only to participate in public debates but to formulate its terms. And for this to happen, humanities researchers need to be able to vary how they disseminate their knowledge. And sometimes, they even need to carry out projects that are designed from the outset to appeal to a non-academic audience.
Can you share something you read/watched/listened to recently that you enjoyed/were inspired by?
I recently watched Mira Burt-Wintonick's Wintopia about her father, filmmaker Peter Wintonick. A beautiful film about filiation, cinema and utopias. And I'm currently reading Naomi Klein's Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. An amazing book about a not-so-amazing time. Her thesis: we won't be able to adequately combat fascism and climate crisis if we fail to understand how enemies constitute our ghostly doubles.
What is a fun fact about you?
I can barely cook an egg, but considering, I watch quite a lot of baking and cooking shows on TV.