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I received my PhD in history of science from the University of Notre Dame in 2002 and my BSc in mathematics and physics from the Université de Montréal in 1995. Prior to joining Laurier, I was a faculty in the Department of History at the University of Guelph (2005-2021) and a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2002-2004).
My monograph Conjuring Science: A History of Scientific Entertainment and Stage Magic in Modern France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) explores the relationship of science, magic and entertainment in nineteenth and early twentieth-century France, focusing on the world of conjurers and magic shows. I am presently working on a SSHRC-funded project dealing with the relationship of opera, medicine, science, and technology in late-nineteenth-century France.
Areas of research for graduate supervision:
- history of science, culture and entertainment
- history of science and religion
- history of the human sciences
- history of modern France
- with Elizabeth Finnis, Colin DeMill, and T. Ryan Gregory, "Teaching the Pandemic: Building an Online Community and Knowledge through Multidisciplinarity, Compassion, and Conversation," in Nancy K. Turner, Nick Baker, David J. Hornsby, Aline Germain-Rutherford, David Graham, and Brad Wuetherick, eds., Online, Open, and Equitable Education: Lessons from Teaching and Learning during the Global Pandemic (Elon, NC: Elon University Center for Engaged Learning Learning, 2024) https://doi.org/10.36284/celelon.oa7
- with Kimberly Francis and Stephanie Frakes, "The Struggling Siren: Speech Therapy and Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande", The Musical Quarterly, (2022) https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdac006
- with Kimberly Francis, "Medicine Goes to the Opera: Vocal Health and Remedies for Professional Singers of the Belle Époque," 19th-Century Music, vol. 44, no. 1 (2020), 19-35
- "Touring a Once Pious Nation: Gender, Medievalism, Tourism, and Catholic Nation-Building in Early Twentieth-Century France," Women's History Review, 29, 1 (2019): 37-55
- "Prophecies of Pilgrimage: The Rise and Fall of Marie Bergadieu, the Ecstatic of Fontet," in Henk de Smaele, Tineke Osselaer, and Kaat Wils-Verhaegen, eds., Sign or Symptom? Exceptional Corporeal Phenomena in Medicine and Religion (Leuven: University of Leuven Press, 2017), 55-74
- with John Donald et al. "On the Place of the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Engineering Curriculum: A Canadian Perspective," Global Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 19, no.1 (2017), 6-18
- with Kimberly Francis, "The Medical and the Musical: French Physiology and Late-Nineteeth-Century Operatic Training," Cambridge Opera Journal, 28, 3 (2017), 347-362
- Conjuring Science: A History of Scientific Entertainment and Stage Magic in Modern France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
- with Heena Mistry, "From the Waters of the Empire to the Tanks of Paris: The Creation and Early Years of the Aquarium Tropical, Palais de la Porte Dorée," Journal of the History of Biology 47 (2014): 1-27
- Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metapsychics in France, 1853-1931 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)
- with Jenna Healey, "On Hans, Zou and the Others: Wonder Animals and the Question of Animal Intelligence in Early Twentieth-Century France," Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological & Biomedical Sciences 41 (2010): 12-20
- “Science on Stage: Recreational Physics, White Magic, and Scientific Wonder at the Nineteenth-Century French Theatre,” History of Science 47, part 3, no. 157 (September 2009): 297-315
Contact Info:
Office location: Dean of Arts Office
Office hours: By appointment.
Languages spoken: French and English