I am an ABD-PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature specializing in the study of French and Francophone Literature. Broadly speaking, I pay attention to reading cultures and networks of influence as pertaining to the production and circulation of literary texts. My dissertation is a cross-reading of twentieth-century Francophone literary texts with historically significant Early Modern documents such as the Black Code, Old Regime dictionaries, and the founding principles of the French Academy. This exercise allows me to write about settler colonialism in the Americas, the little-known history of slavery in French North America, Montreal’s literary scene of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and Francophone Literature as a functional, as opposed to a prescriptive, category. My project has funded support the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am also a Second Language pedagogy enthusiast. As a heritage speaker of French from Quebec, I hold genuine appreciation for diverse modes and forms of expression in my first language. I firmly believe in the tenants of Proficiency-based learning precisely because they allow for idiosyncratic speech from multiple contexts to flourish unabated in spoken and written forms.