- Associated Scholar
Centre for Medieval Studies
University of Toronto
It is a roundabout path that led me to Toronto where I now live and work. I was born in Switzerland, in St-Maurice (Valais). I got my first taste of North America as a teenager when I decided to become an exchange student. Canada was my first choice destination, but the hazards of the selection and distribution process decided otherwise: I went further south, to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I was delighted to experience a year in high school by the ocean (although I love the Alps, I welcomed the exoticism of this change of scenery) surrounded by a wonderfully fun and warm host family. At the end of my senior year in high school, I went back to Switzerland where I got my ‘maturité’ and went on to study English and French literature at the University of Geneva.
My next stop was to be Rome, where I was very fortunate to spend a year (1994-1995) after getting my MA degree. I divided my time between poring over medieval manuscripts in the Vatican Library and drinking cappuccini with another student – a German student who would eventually become my husband and who also found his way to Canada where he now teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto. This Roman stay had a further link to Canada. I took part in a program of study organized by the FIDEM (Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Etudes Médiévales) whose founder and president was Father Leonard E. Boyle. Father Boyle had taught at the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies and at the Centre for Medieval Studies in Toronto before being appointed prefect of the Vatican Library by Pope John Paul II in 1984. After Rome, I devoted the next seven years of my life to the writing of my dissertation, specializing in Old English literature (Old English is the language that was spoken in England from the mid-fifth century to about 1100). During this period, I traveled back and forth between Switzerland and England: in Switzerland, I taught English medieval literature at the Universities of Geneva, Lausanne and Fribourg; in Oxford, I studied Old English literature and took advantage of the extraordinary resources of the Bodleian Library to make substantial progress on my dissertation. The final product of these sustained efforts is a book (Migration, Creation, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature), published by Oxford University Press in 2006.
I came to Toronto just over three years ago. Thanks to a generous grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation, I came as a post-doctoral student and was kindly invited to be part of the Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto. There, I received a most cordial welcome from fellow medievalist scholars and students, and I find myself now part of a large community of friends and colleagues. I am currently working on a new book (tentative title: Questions of Heroism / Heroism in Question). This is a study of the depictions in heroic terms of the protagonists of Old English verse and prose. It will examine how authors choose to ‘heroify’ their protagonists through the use of traditional heroic diction. The wider ambition of this project is to shed some light on the construction aesthetic and social categories, especially on how a society constructs heroic models and on how these models offer ways in which to articulate the individual and the collective and to generate processes of identification and (self-)representation. I am also teaching medieval literature at the University of Toronto at Scarborough.
In addition to my academic interests, I work part-time for Charles Hanly, Emeritus philosophy professor at the University of Toronto and currently President of the International Psychoanalytic Association.
FMP/13 April 2010
Contact info: fabienne.michelet@utoronto.ca
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