Researcher's site: Dr. Dominique Hétu

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Contact Information

Email: hetud@brandonu.ca

Research Interests

Dr. Dominique Hétu (she/her) is a bilingual Canadian (French-English) scholar trained in Canadian literatures who has been Assistant Professor in the Department of Francophone Studies and Languages since August 2020. Dr. Hétu is a specialist in comparative literary and cultural studies whose theoretical approach aligns with the concept of culture from below. She predominantly examines the functions and responses of contemporary literary and cultural production in Quebec and Canada to interpersonal and sociopolitical struggles, focusing on vulnerability narratives, poetics of care, and representations of belonging, responsibility, and relationality, critical notions for thinking through minoritized and vulnerable experiences, as well as for teaching a language such as French in a minority setting. She has published in English and French on those topics in several articles and book chapters.

Before coming to BU, Dr. Hétu completed a postdoctoral fellowship (SSHRC) at the Canadian Literature Centre of the University of Alberta (2017-2020), where she also worked as Assistant Teaching Professor at Faculty Saint-Jean (French campus). She has been teaching undergraduate courses since 2008 in literary and cultural studies, French language, and second-language acquisition in a minority setting. She has taught those topics as well as advanced research skills, comparative literature, and comparative stylistics. Her pedagogical approach focuses on student-centered, inclusive, and accessible teaching, learning, and assessing practices that foster good relations. As such, she is committed to teaching transcultural and transnational content that speaks to the necessity of considering a broad variety of gender, race, and class-based perspectives across historical periods, spaces, and forms.

Dr. Hétu is currently reviewing a monograph, in French, on the transformative and damaging manifestations of care in contemporary literature in Québec (Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2026). She is also the lead editor for an edited volume titled Living and Learning with Feminist Ethics and Poetics Today, to be published with U of Alberta Press (Dec 2024). She is also putting the final touches on a first poetry collection (Hurlantes Éditrices, March 2025) on issues of fat phobia and fat shaming. The next stage of her research shifts from a politics of care to a politics of the ordinary to continue examining the critical and literary manifestations and configurations of vulnerability and precarity.

Research Area

French and Francophone studies; Comparative literature; Contemporary literature;

Keywords

Women's writing; Ethics of care; Ordinary ethics; Narratives of vulnerability

Field(s)

Arts:Francophone Studies and Languages