Abigail Fields

Abigail Fields is the Hall Family Foundation Assistant Professor of French. They are interested in the ways that the “environment” is imagined, understood and manipulated in various forms of cultural production in France and the Francophone world. Their current work focuses in particular on the representation of agricultural land, labor and products in French-language literature (poetry, prose and theater), film, visual arts, newspapers, advertising campaigns and various forms of popular media. Their current book project focuses on the development of the identity of the peasant-farmer in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reading literary texts along with scientific, political philosophical and other historical documents, they reconstruct a cultural history of agriculture in Metropolitan France and its colonies, arguing that the definitions of farming and the farmer shift to conform to and perpetuate the ideological and political agenda of the French nation and empire. While they are a specialist of the nineteenth century, their research commitments extend beyond this period, into the twenty and twenty-first centuries. In a separate body of work, they think about feminist and queer ecologies in modern and contemporary literature from the Maghreb, with a particular focus on the works of Yamina Mechakra, Samira Negrouche and Jean Sénac.

They are a co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. In addition to their academic work, they are also a poet.