A Month on the Road: Dr. Claire-Marie Brisson Brings Francophone North America to Five Stages

In March 2026, Claire-Marie Brisson, Preceptor in French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, crisscrossed the continent as a featured speaker at five events spanning Maine, Québec, Louisiana, and Indiana — a month of public and scholarly engagement that brought her research on Francophone identity in North America to audiences ranging from genealogical societies to international academic colloquiums.

The month opened on March 14 at the Good Medicine Collective in Portland, Maine, where Dr. Brisson participated in a literary panel tied to French All Around Us, the TBR Books anthology series in which her chapter, "The Francophonie is Here: French Language and Francophone Identity in the Rust Belt," appears. The panel brought together writers and scholars to explore the living presence of French and Francophone cultures across North America: a conversation particularly resonant in Maine, one of the most historically Franco-American states in the country.

Two days later, on March 16, Brisson delivered a one-hour prestige lecture at Cégep Beauce-Appalaches in Saint-Georges, Québec, titled "Partir, rester, transmettre : le français en Amérique du Nord." Weaving personal family narrative together with historical and sociolinguistic analysis, the lecture traced the trajectories of French-speaking communities across the continent, from migration and dispersal to cultural transmission across generations. A version of the lecture was later presented to the Société de généalogie de Lanaudière on March 25, bringing the same questions of heritage, language, and belonging to an audience with deep roots in research.

The academic centerpiece of the month came on March 21, when Brisson presented at the Williams Research Center in New Orleans as part of the symposium One Single Place: Louisiana and the Reshaping of the Early American Republic. Her talk, "From Prestige to Erasure: Language and the Making of Belonging in North America," offered a nuanced reframing of French in early America, arguing that the language was never experienced uniformly. The talk traced how "Frenchness" evolved unevenly across early American geographies, with language oscillating between a marker of prestige and a target of erasure depending on place, politics, and alliance.

The month concluded on March 27 at the University of Notre Dame, where Brisson joined the Panel on Linguistic Landscapes at the 20th and 21st-Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium, delivering her paper "Voix du Nitassinan: Remembering, Translating, Listening," on sound and voice in Innu poetry in Canada by Joséphine Bacon and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine.

Brisson's March engagements reflect the breadth of her scholarly reach: from archives and early American history to contemporary Indigenous literatures, from academic symposia to community genealogical societies, and from English-language panels to French-language lectures. Her book Michiganaise: Tracing Francophone Identity in the Great Lakes is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press and traces these same threads.