Chantal Ringuet

Chantal Ringuet (born in Quebec City) is a Canadian scholar, award-winning author and translator.

After completing a Ph.D. in literary studies (2007, UQÀM, Honourable Mention), Ringuet has been a postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish studies at the University of Ottawa (2007-8) and earned a master's degree in International Management at l’ÉNAP (2009). Since 2014, she has been a Fellow at YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Studies in New York, scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in Boston and translator-in-residence at the Banff Center for the Arts and Creativity, research associate at Concordia University's Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies (Montreal) and lecturer at the Institut européen Emmanuel Lévinas (AIU) in Paris. In Winter 2019, she was writer-in-residence (visiting scholar) at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. She is the first writer to stay in the Gröndalshause Literature City Residence in Reykjavik UNESCO City of Literature (October 2019).

Her research and creative writing stands at the intersection of literature and visual arts, Jewish studies and Women's Studies. Focusing on the preservation and transmission of the collective memory and the Jewish heritage worldwide, Ringuet acts as a “cultural translator” of the diverse forms of Jewish civilization and identity. She has contributed to many art exhibition catalogues and translated literary works focusing on the cultural hybridity pervading contemporary artistic practices, and on the intergenerational transmission of trauma in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Her work is deeply inspired by psychoanalysis and the freudian heritage of Mitteleuropa. She translates from Yiddish and English to French.

Her first poetry book, Le sang des ruines (Écrits des Hautes-terres, Gatineau, 2010), which focuses on two narrative voices of Holocaust survivors, was awarded the prix littéraire Jacques-Poirier in 2009. Her second collection of poetry, Under the Skin of War (BuschekBooks, Ottawa, 2014), which is written both in French and English, was inspired by the British photojournalist Don McCullin. Ringuet is also the author of À la découverte du Montréal yiddish (Éditions Fides, 2011) and she edited the first anthology of Canadian Yiddish literature in French translation, Voix yiddish de Montréal (Moebius, no 139, Montreal, 2013). With Gérard Rabinovitch, she has published Les révolutions de Leonard Cohen (PUQ, 2016), which received a 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award. With Pierre Anctil, she has published a translation of the early biography of Marc Chagall (Mon univers. Autobiographie, Fides, 2017), launched for the opening of the international exhibition Chagall : Colour and Music at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the biggest Canadian exhibition ever devoted to Marc Chagall.

According to Simone Grossman, professor at the Department of French language and culture at Bar-Ilan University, her poetry illustrates the power of “affiliative postmemory” (Marianne Hirsch) through the relation between image and text.

She has participated in many cultural and academic events, including at Harvard University, Yale University, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and was guest lecturer at the University of London, the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, the Toronto Jewish Literary Festival, KlezKanada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Blue Metropolis and the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

Awards

• Canadian Jewish Literary Award, 2017, category "Jewish Thought and Culture"
• Prix littéraire Jacques-Poirier 2009

Grants

• Doctoral grant, Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC), 2003-2005
• Postdoctoral grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), 2007-2008
• Grant for Professional Writers - Creative Writing Program, Canada Council for the Arts, 2015.
• Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship 2015-2016, Max Weinreich Center, YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research), New York
• International residency grant, Canada Council for the Arts, 2019

Residences

• Scholar-in-residence, Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Brandeis University, Waltham/Boston, Massachusetts, 2016
• Writer-in-residence (Winter Writer's Retreat), Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, February 2017
• Translator in residence, Banff International Literary Centre (BILTC), June 2017
• Writer-in-Residence, Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Brandeis University, 2019
• Reykjavik UNESCO City of Literature Residence (inauguration), October 2019.

On September 20, 2015, Ringuet has participated in the 2015 Rock'n'Roll Marathon Oasis de Montreal in order to raise funds for the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Center. She has run in the memory of French writer and resistant Charlotte Delbo, and in the memory of all Jewish intellectuals who were deported in the concentration camps during World War II.