Denis Michael Provencher

Dr. Denis M. Provencher is Professor of French and Francophone studies in the Department of French and Italian and affiliate faculty in Anthropology, Gender and Women's Studies, the Institute for LGBT Studies, Linguistics, and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. He served as Head of Department from 2016 until 2021. He earned his interdisciplinary Ph.D. in French Civilization from The Pennsylvania State University in 1998. Before joining the University of Arizona in 2016, Dr. Provencher worked at the University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse (1998-2005) and the University of Maryland Baltimore County (2005-2016) where he directed the MA program in Intercultural Communication. His main interests include French civilization and cultural studies, language, gender and sexuality, migration and diaspora studies, conversation and discourse analysis, intercultural pragmatics, and critical intercultural communication.

Dr. Provencher is the author of Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship in France (Ashgate/Routledge, 2007) and Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations, (Liverpool UP, 2017). Queer Maghrebi French won the 2017 Ruth Benedict Book Prize, Honorable Mention, from the Association of Queer Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.  With Dr. Siham Bouamer, he has co-edited the volume Abdellah Taïa's Queer Migrations: Non-Places, Affect, and Temporalities (Lexington Books, 2021).  He is currently preparing a new co-edited volume with Dr. Siham Bouamer and Dr. Ryan Schroth on Queer Realms of Memory, building on the work of Pierre Nora.  Dr. Provencher is also conducting fieldwork in Ottawa and Montréal, Canada for a new monograph on Queer Québec Diaspora, which is funded in part by the Chaire Moblité Francophone Program at L’Université d’Ottawa.  

Dr. Provencher is the editor-in-chief of the journal Contemporary French Civilization (CFC), the new companion journal CFC Intersections, and co-editor of the book series Studies in Modern and Contemporary France, which are published by Liverpool. Dr. Provencher has guest co-edited special issues of several journals including the Journal of Homosexuality and Québec Studies. He also currently serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Language and Sexuality.