Professor of French and Francophone Studies
U of Arizona
Biographical Sketch: 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, French & Italian (2016 - 2021) and as Interim Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies (2018). 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). With Dr. Siham Bouamer and Dr. Ryan Schroth, he is currently completing a new co-edited volume, Queer Realms of Memory: Archiving LGBTQ Sites and Symbols in the French National Narrative (Under contract with Liverpool UP). Dr. Provencher is also conducting fieldwork in Francophone 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.
Dr. Provencher is also a firm believer in leadership training and an advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion. He is a former fellow (2018-19) of the Academic Leadership Institute (ALI) at the University of Arizona. He has co-chaired (2021-22) the College of Humanities' committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and completed (2020-21) the Inclusive Leadership Cohort Certificate (ILCC) program, for which he currently serves on the steering committee. He is also the 2022 recipient of the Richard Ruiz Diversity Leadership Faculty Award, which is given in recognition to a faculty member working to make the University of Arizona a more diverse and inclusive campus.