New Knowledge: Nonfiction Lightning Round

December 6, 2025 at 12 pm – 1 p.m.
Main Stage, Salle des célébrations

• Nathalie Cooke
• Martha Langford
• Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher
• Stephen Monteiro
• Francine Pelletier
• Catherine Richardson
• Alex R. Tipei
• Thomas Waugh
• Andrei Zanescu

Moderated by Ryan Van Huijstee

Often, fiction gets the limelight, poetry gets the prestige. But nonfiction books are published every day that help illuminate, preserve and create the world around us. Join local authors as they share the passions that led them to investigate a single subject in depth and then write an entire book about it.

Nathalie Cooke is an English professor at McGill University and a specialist in literary food studies and material culture. Her research uncovers the hidden stories told by menus, textiles, and other everyday artefacts, revealing how their forms, codes, and designs shape what we remember, and how we read.

Catherine Richardson Kineweskwêw is a Métis therapist, family therapist, researcher and academic working at Concordia University. Her maternal relatives come from Fort Chipewyan and have ties to Red River. She holds a research Chair in Indigenous Healing Knowledges and teaches in First Peoples Studies and Creative Arts Therapies. She is a co-founder of the Centre for Response-Based Practice where she and her colleagues advance dignity-centered approaches to violence. Cathy is also interested in the broader and multi-dimensional aspects of healing, such as the person as whole being, a spirit in a body with emotions, intelligence, physicality and in relation to all beings in the natural world. 

She has taught in various counselling and social work programs and is the former director of the First Peoples Studies program at Concordia University. She explores various approaches to well- being on her substack podcast, where she speaks with healers, activists and response-based therapists. She is a student of shamanic practice and the mother of three amazing adult children.

Martha Langford, FRSC, is the author of A History of Photography in Canada. The first of three volumes, Anticipation to Participation, 1839 1918 has just appeared. Beautifully produced, the book is both lively and comprehensive, with over 400 illustrations. Langford is a distinguished professor emeriti of Concordia University in Montreal. She is the former research chair and director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. In prior lives, she was the founding director of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, an affiliate of the National Gallery of Canada, and before that, Executive Producer of the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada. She has organized photographic exhibitions for museums and festivals in Canada, the UK, and Europe.

Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher is editor-in-chief of Liberté. She has worked as an editor at both Remue-ménage and Écosociété, with a focus on environmental, anti-capitalist, and feminist work. In addition to having collaborated with numerous collectives, blogs, and magazines, she published Procès Verbal and Promenade sur Marx, published in English under the title Jenny, Eleanor, and Laura, et al., translated by Mélissa Bull.

Stephen Monteiro teaches and researches media and culture at Concordia University. He has written or edited several books, including Needy Media, The Fabric of Interface, and The Screen Media Reader. He has contributed as an expert on contemporary technology to CBC Radio and the Toronto Star, among other media outlets. 

Well-known journalist, documentary filmmaker, teacher and broadcaster, Francine Pelletier, formerly of CBC’s the fifth estate, is the author of three books: Second début: Cendres et renaissance du féminisme, Atelier 10, (2015), a short personal history of feminism in Quebec; : L’Art de se mouiller : Chroniques pour nourrir le débat,  Écosociété (2022), a selection of her columns in Le Devoir from 2013-22; and Dream Interrupted : the Rise and Fall of Quebec Nationalism, Sutherland House (2025).

A transnational historian, primarily focused on Southeast Europe and France, Alex R. Tipei is professor of history and international studies at the Université de Montréal. MQUP published her book, Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World. Alex’s research has received funding from SSHRC, the Fulbright Program, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has taught and researched at McGill and Princeton Universities as well as the Universities of Bucharest and Illinois. Alex is also a team leader on the European Research Council funded project Transnational Histories of Corruption in South-East-Central Europe based at New Europe College/Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest.

Ryan Van Huijstee is the director of Concordia University Press. He previously held a range of roles at University of Toronto Press and McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Thomas Waugh is a writer, programmer, and activist who taught film studies and sexuality at Concordia University from 1976 to 2017. He is the author of The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinema; and fourteen other books.