Hélène Cazes has been teaching at the French Department at Uvic since 2001. A full Professor since 2014, she has been the Coordinator of the outreach program of Humanities/Continuing Studies (2009-2015) and the Director of the program of Medieval Studies (2013-2018). Former President of the APFUCC (Association des Professeurs de Français des Universités et des Collèges Canadiens, 2008-2010) and of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies (2014-1016), she received the 2013 Research Excellence Award of the Faculty of Humanities and the 2014 Victoria Leadership Award (UVic). She has been a member of the Board of Governors (2014-2017) and of the Senate (2019-…) at the University of Victoria, and the Graduate Advisor of the French department (2009-2012 and 2015-2017), she is an active member in three Interdisciplinary Programs.
Interested in the tradition and reception of knowledge, icons, ideas —and even fake science —, she uses literary theory and methodology for readings of medieval and Early Modern texts; she has published collections of essays and numerous papers on editorial mediations, book culture, friendship in the Republic of Letters, history of medicine, and bibliography. She is the director of the Open Journal Topiques, Études Satoriennes.
Her current research project Perfecta, La Perfection du corps féminin: discours anatomiques et défense des femmes, 16-18 explores the connections between feminism (or misogyny) and history of anatomy.
She launched in May 2020 and has since coordinated the community memorial project Mémoire de la traversée : francophones de la C-B dans la Covid-19 .
Her latest book publication is the edition and annotation, in collaboration with Frédéric Charbonneau, of a 1772 medical work on women’s and children’s clothes : Alphonse Leroy, Recherches sur les habillemens des femmes et des enfans, Paris, Hermann, 2019.
ORCID 0000-0003-2370-1224
For more details, see my official academic CV.