Lost Spaces and Contested Places: Dispatches from Cistercian Monasteries, Colonial Archives, and the Streets of Paris

Every year, the Centre for the Study of France and the Francophone World (CEFMF) provides PhD students at the University of Toronto with short-term doctoral research grants to pursue field research in France and the Francophone world. Join us for a workshop with this year’s awardees – Jamie Collings, Heywot Tadesse, and Fan Xu – as they share dispatches from their fieldwork. Serendipitously, all three projects speak to the power of particular Francophone places – from monasteries to streets to islands. How do these evocative sites accrue meaning? How do they change and become contested? And what can we gain from recovering the histories of these lost spaces? Presentation 1: "Tiles, masonry, and grisaille: abstract geometricity in French Cistercian art and architecture," by Jamie Collings • Jamie Collings is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies. He works on the history of High Medieval Europe, especially monasticism. Jamie is also interested in art history, particularly ceramic, and ideas and ideals of artistic representation. Presentation 2: "“Cette île quoique fort belle et grande n'est néanmoins point habitée”: Inhabited islands, contested hospitalities, and narratives of extinction in the history of the seventeenth-century Eastern Caribbean," by Heywot Tadesse • Heywot Tadesse is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the History department at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation examines the shift from dietetics to nutrition science alongside colonial and naval provisioning policies and logistics involving everyday subsistence for all inhabitants of the early modern Caribbean. Presentation 3: "In Search of Lost Space, Proust's Paris in 2026," by Fan Xu • Fan Xu is a PhD candidate from the Department of French at the University of Toronto. Commingling critical philosophy and literary discourses, his research interests straddle heterogeneous cultural spheres and time periods, and include anthropology of images, Proust studies, Frankfurt School, comparative philosophy, and mystic poetry.