Antoine DAMIENS

Antoine Damiens is a FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow within the Department of English and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. In 2018, I completed a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University, where I was humbled to be named as the valedictorian for the Faculty of Fine Arts. My research examines the intersection of academic labor, archival theory, the history queer and feminist (film) theory, and research-curation. My first monograph, entitled 'LGBTQ Film Festivals: Queering Festival Studies, Curating Queerness,' is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press (2020). In exploring ephemeral LGBT film festivals that have been ignored by scholars, often existing as mere traces within archival collections, this book examines the political project and disciplinary assumptions that structure festival research: which festivals do we include within our histories? How do festival studies’ methodologies orient us toward particular objects? In conceptualizing festivals not as mere objects but as active agents through which scholars create knowledge, this book pays homage to the labor of queer organizers, critics, and scholars who are gradually retiring. At McGill, I will be working on a new research project, ‘LGBTQ and Feminist Film Studies as Research-Curation’. This project will examine various festivals, films, and archives created by feminist and queer scholars from the 1970s to the 2000s as they intersect with the evolution of academic labor.