Faculty Spotlight
Vincent Masse
Our first faculty spotlight is on Associate Professor Vincent Masse, whom we have been incredibly lucky to welcome as a joint faculty member from the Department of French!
A historian of medieval and early modern Europe with a background in literature, Dr. Masse has dissected a wide variety of topics across more than twenty publications. His upcoming book explores l鈥檌nvention des nouvelles 茅trang猫res (Inventing Foreign News) in early modern France, by examining experimental materials generated before newspapers gained prominence in the 1630s. Along with producing fifty edited examples of news reports which shared stories from places primarily outside of Europe, Masse鈥檚 research reveals a number of fascinating parallels between early French news productions and materials we interact with today. For example, the readership of pre-newspaper France appreciated dramatic, eye-catching headlines detailing unknown worlds (clickbait!), and imagery with elevated notoriety that spanned well beyond their original production and purpose (memes!).
Dr. Masse has been teaching at 黄色直播 since 2010, on topics spanning from medieval history and European literature, to love and death as portrayed in French poetry, and even a course examining historic and fictional interpretations of the end of the world.
With such a wide breadth and depth of research and knowledge, Dr. Masse can provide excellent opportunities for graduate students looking for supervisors, especially those interested in exploring medieval or early modern contact literature (materials produced when two cultures encounter each another, such as travel narratives), ephemeral literature (including newspapers and print records), and apocalyptic literature and discourse.
Dr. Masse also notes that there is currently a lot of opportunity for students interested in researching printed media, particularly brochures, as many of these sources have only been recently rediscovered in archives after years of improper cataloguing. Graduate students looking for the opportunity to complete hands-on research will especially enjoy these untouched and oft-undigitized materials, many of which have been waiting for hundreds of years to be read and analyzed.
Interested in learning more about Dr. Masse, his research, and the process of becoming a graduate student in the Department of History? Reach out to the department at gradhist@dal.ca.
Interview and article by Katie Ritchie, MA student, Dept. of History