April 3, 2025
@ 4:00 PM in
The Bangor room at the Memorial Union

Jean-Christophe Cloutier will discuss Jack Kerouac’s writerly coming of age from the perspective of his geopolitical and cultural-linguistic reality as a bilingual, first-generation immigrant Franco-American author. Cloutier will address the author’s private French manuscripts, preserved in his archive and published posthumously, to uncover an author who relied on self-translation to negotiate his lifelong dualism between French and English, and who willfully adopted what he called “the tone of a big American writer” to find literary success in the United States.

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is originally from Québec and is currently associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature, and editor of La vie est d’hommage, which gathers the original French writings of Jack Kerouac. He also translated into English two of Kerouac’s French manuscripts for the Library of America’s The Unknown Kerouac. In 2023, Gallimard released his stand-alone edition of Sur le chemin, Kerouac’s longest French manuscript. He is currently completing an extensive study of Kerouac’s oeuvre that explores the writer’s practices as a bilingual novelist, translator, and archivist.

For more information, contact: frederic.rondeau@maine.edu

The Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine has recently acquired new resources for Canadian Studies. Among the new acquisitions, are 82 print books, 5 audio books, 146 e-books, and over 800 government documents. These new resources cover topics ranging from Canadian travel guides, to short stories by Canadian women. To see the list, and acquisitions from previous years, head to the

This May, sponsored by the Canadian-American Center, director Frederic Rondeau and center staff took students to Quebec for a week long francophone language immersion course. Students visited important cultural sites throughout the region, including the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Assemblée nationale du Québec, the Wendake indigenous site of the Huron-Wendat Nation, and more.

The 91���� College of Liberal Arts and Sciences shares the full story here.

The editors of the American Review of Canadian Studies invite submissions for the journal’s biennial Thomas O. Enders Special Issue on Canada-U.S. Relations, which they plan to publish in late 2023. Full-length article submissions from all disciplines and from interdisciplinary perspectives are welcome, but they should, in some way, focus on the issue’s main theme: the past, present, or future of Canada-U.S. Relations.

The Enders Special Issue is named in honor of the former United States Ambassador to Canada (1976-81). Among the many interests Thomas Enders pursued during his distinguished career in foreign service was the promotion of Canadian Studies in his own country. The Enders Foundation, which he established, provides funding for the publication of this biennial special issue. Deadline for submissions for the 2023 Enders Special Issue of ARCS: August 15, 2023. All completed article manuscripts for this special issue should follow ARCS’s regular guidelines for length and citation format. See the “Instructions for Authors” page on the ARCS website for details.

For more information, contact:
Andrew Holman or Brian Payne, Co-editors, American Review of Canadian Studies: arcs@bridgew.edu

The Canadian-American Center is now accepting applications for Summer 2022 Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) awards.

This award competition is open to all graduate students who wish to improve their French proficiency in Canada. 

The Award covers tuition up to $5000 and offers a $2500 stipend. 

Credits can be transferred to 91����. 

For more information, visit this link.

OR

Contact Dr. Frederic Rondeau via email at frederic.rondeau@maine.edu.

ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS 

To be eligible to apply for a Summer FLAS fellowship, a student must meet the following criteria: 

• Be a US citizen or permanent resident 
• Already be at the Intermediate or advanced level in French
• Be enrolled or accepted in a full-time graduate program at 91����
• Be enrolled in a 6 weeks intensive summer language study (140 contact hours) in French

Application Deadline : March 15

Join the Canadian-American Center in welcoming Dr. Janet Mancini Billson as she presents “Canada and the Global Refugee Crisis” at 91����. This presentation explores refugee resettlement and integration challenges in Canada. Examples are based on Dr. Billson’s research in Canada with Doukhobor, Rohingya, Syrian, Kurdish, Bhutanese, Vietnamese, Liberian, and Congolese refugees.

The event will take place on October 25th, at 12:00 PM.  The event will be held in person at the Memorial Union in the Coe Room. A free boxed-lunch will be available in limited quantities.

91���� Dr. Janet Mancini Billson

Janet Mancini Billson, PhD, CCS, is Director of Group Dimensions International and former Professor of Sociology at The George Washington University and Rhode Island College. She received her MA and PHD in Sociology from Brandeis University. She has conducted policy research since 1981, focusing on international development, social policy, organizational collaboration, and strategic planning. She is the author of several books on identity, marginality, refugee resettlement and integration, and social change, including two forthcoming books: Refugees in the Canadian Mosaic: Their Journey to Resettlement and Hope (Lexington Books, 2022) and People of Peace: How Persecution Leads to Protest and Terrorism (Purich, 2022). Female Well-Being: Towards a Global Theory of Social Change (with Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, 2006, includes a chapter on women in Canada). Inuit Women: Their Powerful Spirit in A Century of Change (with Kyra Mancini, 2007) is based on twelve years of ethnographic research on Baffin Island. Keepers of the Culture: The Power of Tradition in Women’s Lives (1995) is based on eight years of interviews with indigenous, immigrant, and religious minority women in Canada. She is also co-author (with Richard Majors) of Cool Pose: Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America.

Janet is author of numerous articles and book chapters on resettlement, women, and identity, and has lectured widely on women in development, Inuit resettlement, and the Millennium Development Goals/Sustainable Development Goals. She has written several training manuals for qualitative methods, including In Focus: How Focus Groups Can Improve Your Evaluations and The World Bank Institute Guidelines for Effective Focus Group Research (The World Bank); and Conducting Systematic and Dynamic Key Informant Interviews; The Power of Focus Groups for Social and Policy Research: Focus on International Development; and Conducting Effective Focus Groups in the Field: The GDI Mini-Manual (Skywood Press).

As founder and director of Group Dimensions International, research, training, and lecturing have taken Janet to over 70 countries. Her clients include foundations, hospitals, universities, and government agencies in Canada and the U.S.; the World Bank Group, Inter-American Development Bank, and the African Development Bank; development research organizations such as IDRC (Canada) and FASID (Japan); and United Nations agencies (UNWOMEN and UNESCAP). Her work has contributed to social policy and programmatic shifts at all levels. Her most recent research is based on interviews across world regions: “Review of  The World Bank’s Global Gender Strategy—Progress toward Closing the Gender Gap” (2020) and “Review of IMF’s Private Sector Education Investments: Engagement with Global Civil Society Organizations, Local CSOs, World Bank Education Specialists, IFC Education Sector Staff and Managers, and Global Education Experts” (2021). 

A Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Danforth Associate, Janet was Alumni of the Year, Baldwin-Wallace College (1999) and has received the Award for Sociological Practice (Society for Applied Sociology, 2000), the Stuart A. Rice Achievement Award (District of Columbia Sociological Society, 2001), and the Lester F. Ward Distinguished Contributions to Applied and Clinical Sociology Award (AACS, 2008). Her keynote speech for the 2019 Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology Annual Meeting focused on the Sustainable Development Goals as a roadmap for sociological practice.

Join us for a presentation by writer Maxime Raymond Bock on October 21, 2021 from 9:30 AM to 10:45 AM. Maxime will present on “Atavismes et ses histoires 10 ans plus tard: relecture d’une écriture du Québec.”  The event will be presented in French and held on Zoom.

To register for the online event,

For more on Bock, visit the following link:

Nine graduate students and recent graduates will participate in the Emerging Scholars Colloquium to be held virtually on October 2, 2021.  They were selected because their research includes Québec, Francophone Canada and Franco-America.  This year’s participants are Philippe Halbert, Yale University, Aine McAlinden, Georgetown University,  Marie-Lise Drapeau-Bisson, University of Toronto, Heidi Beckman, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Emilie Drouin, Université de Montréal, Jaclyn Maraldo, Tulane University, Ali Friend, University of Maine, Saeideh Hezaveh, Université de Sherbrooke, and Sarah Yahyaoui, City University of New York.

The Emerging Scholars Colloquium is a feature of the American Council for Québec Studies biennial conference, but will be a stand-alone event this fall. The Colloquium is organized by Dr. Frederic Rondeau, Associate Professor of French and Director of the Canadian-American Center at 91����, and Dr. Charles Batson, Professor of French at Union College, with Dr. Jane Moss, Professor of French at Colby College and Dr. Amy Ransom, Professor of French at Central Michigan University.

For more information visit