
Contact Information
Office Hours
(on Zoom) Mondays 2:00-3:00pm and by appointment
Research Areas
Research Interests
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature
Gender and sexuality studies
Québec and francophone literatures
Literary theory, translation studies
Marcel Proust
Research Description
Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France (University of Toronto Press, 2019) shows how, in a cultural context of perceived national decline and contentious educational reforms, the adolescent male reader became a subject of grave social concern in late-nineteenth-century France. This research project was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The book was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2020 by Choice Reviews (Association of College and Research Libraries) and the chapter "Bourget, the Chambige Affair, and the Queer Seductions of the Novel" received the 2020 HRI Faculty Prize for Research in the Humanities. A webinar presenting the book is available on H-France Salon.
Victims of the Book has been praised as "intelligent, timely, and groundbreaking" (Choice); "ambitious and thought-provoking ... one of Proulx's great strengths is his ability to tell a historicist, contextualist story through sustained and sensitive close readings" (French Studies); "a thorough, scholarly work grounded in research that extends well beyond even the margins of the canon and pays rewardingly close attention to texts" (French Forum); "a refreshingly successful example of literary analysis that addresses both critical and historiographical concerns" (H-France Review).
I am Associate Editor of Nineteenth-Century French Studies, as well as a member of the editorial boards of Bulletin d'informations proustiennes and Bulletin Marcel Proust. I am also an affiliate of the Proust research team (Équipe Proust) at ITEM, the Institute for Modern Texts and Manuscripts, Paris (Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes, CNRS/ENS).
I am co-director, with Caroline Szylowicz, of the U.S. team for Corr-Proust, the new digital edition of Marcel Proust's correspondence, an ongoing international research collaboration.
Education
PhD, Harvard University
BA, McGill University (First-Class Honours)
Awards and Honors
Conrad Humanities Scholar (2020-2025)
HRI Prize for Research in the Humanities (2020)
Helen Corley Petit Scholar (2019-2020)
Campus Distinguished Promotion Award (2019)
NEH Fellowship (2015-2016)
Courses Taught
- French 211: Introduction to Literary Studies
- French 311: Love Stories
- French 322: World Literature in French
- French 336: French Cultural History 1789-1968
- French 443: Quebec Literature and Film
- French 543: Gender, Race and Modernity
- French 574: Reading in the 19th-Century French Novel
- French 578: Marcel Proust
- French 579: French Literature meets Queer Theory
Additional Campus Affiliations
Highlighted Publications
Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France (University of Toronto Press, 2019) shows how the adolescent male reader became a subject of grave social concern in late-nineteenth-century France, and examines literary responses by prominent novelists of the period, including Jules Vallès, Paul Bourget, Maurice Barrès, André Gide, and Marcel Proust.
Listed as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2020 (Choice Reviews).
Proust and the Arts (Cambridge University Press, 2015; paperback, 2018) brings together expert Proustians and renowned interdisciplinary scholars in a major reconsideration of the novelist's relation to the arts.
Recent Publications
Proulx, François. "Trois lettres de Reynaldo Hahn à Marcel Proust". Bulletin Marcel Proust. 2021, 71. 17-22.
Proulx, François "'Un autre moi-même': Between the Self and the Other in Proust's Correspondence". and Brillaud, Jérôme Greene, Virginie (ed.). Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy: Chance and Choice. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2021, 153-164. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350160934.ch-012
Proulx, François, Caroline Szylowicz and Claire Baytaş. "Vingt lettres à Louis d'Albufera". Bulletin d’informations proustiennes. 2021, 51. 9-32.
Mesch, Rachel et al. "Reflections on Gender Studies in our Field: Conversation". Nineteenth-Century French Studies. 2020, 48(3-4). 201-224. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncf.2020.0005
Proulx, François. "Beyond the Epistemology of the Closet". Nineteenth-Century French Studies. 2020, 48(3-4). 185-192. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncf.2020.0005