2024 BMO Postdoctoral Fellow

Universit茅 de Sherbrooke|聽Rachel.Nadon [at] USherbrooke.ca (Email)

With a PhD in French-language literatures from Universit茅 de Montr茅al, Rachel Nadon works on the relationship between emotions and the sensational press. Member of the , she works at the crossroads of cultural studies and literary history. She co-edited the collective (PUM, 2021). She is also director of .

Her research project as a BMO Postdoctoral Fellow is聽鈥淓motions and archives of feelings: reading Montreal through All么 police, 1970-2004鈥�.

With a print run of almost 200,000 copies in 1954, All么 police quickly established itself in the reading habits of its readers, while retaining a reputation for bad press until its closure in 2004. Intimately linked to urban life (but not only) and nightlife, the Montr茅al weekly relied on sensationalist treatment of crime news and photos. A source of inspiration, disgust or fascination, All么 police is a kind of media commonplace, even a lieu de m茅moire, whose editorial archives have been entirely lost. This is more often the case with mass-market publications than with other cultural products and works.

The project aims to help 鈥渇ill in鈥� some of its missing archive by combining 1) an analysis of the poetics of the newspaper (forms, discourses, objects) and the various ways in which Montreal is present in its pages (situated bodies, streets and neighbourhoods, people featured in articles, cultural or sporting events, etc.) and 2) an analysis of the 鈥渁lternative鈥� archives produced by All么 police, conceived as "archives of feelings", to use Ann Cvetkovich's (2003) expression. Anchored in Montr茅al鈥檚 urban space, a popular figure with an often transgressive reading, the crime newspaper supports and 鈥減roduces鈥� archives of feelings that shed light on new ways of inhabiting the city. The research question that drives this project is: What archive of Montr茅al feelings can be constituted by interweaving voices and readings of the mass-market weekly All么 police (1970-2004)? Focusing on a period marked by several major events for Montr茅al, including the 1976 Olympic Games and the rise of the feminist movements, the project examines the relationship between emotions, memory and urban space through the weekly crime news.