Monde moderne, mondes alternatifs
Sources et prolongements du dix-huitième siècle
Oct 15, 2025 to Oct 17, 2025 — All day
The international and interdisciplinary conference Modern World, Alternative Worlds - Sources and Extensions of the Eighteenth Century is co-organized by professors from the University of Ottawa, the Université de Bourgogne and the Université de Paris-Nanterre.
The conference brings together participants (students and professors, museum curators) from Canada, Europe, Japan, and Ivory Coast, working in fields such as history, philosophy, theater, literature, anthropology, art history, etc. The presentations explore various types of utopian frameworks (works, concrete experiences), or different ways of relating to them, and feature a variety of presentation formats: talks, round tables, staged performances, and experience narratives. While it highlights the eighteenth century, it also opens up to the long history of utopianism.
Program
October 15, 2025
9:00 AM – Welcome and breakfast
9:30 AM–12:00 PM | Morning Session
Theme: Necessity and Contingency of Alternatives
- 9:30 AM – Mitia Rioux-Beaulne (University of Ottawa) – General Introduction
- 10:00 AM – Thierry Hoquet (University Paris Nanterre) – The archaeology of the future and the plurality of possible worlds
- 10:40 AM – Na Kyung Lee (University Paris Nanterre) – Is a better scenario for humanity possible? Imagining alternative worlds in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws
- 11:20 AM – Danilo Marques (University of Ottawa) – “Let us transport ourselves to those supposed times”: Deschamps read through Ernst Bloch
12:00 PM – Lunch
1:30 PM–5:00 PM | Afternoon Session
Theme: Impossible Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment
- Alexis Tétreault – “The lessons of the Epicurean”: an alternative history of Enlightenment Epicureanism through Ninon de Lenclos
- Vincent Brazeau – Diderot and posterity: timelessness as the ultimate embodiment of potential worlds
- Pascale Couturier-Rose – Possible worlds according to women writers of the Ancien Régime
- Béatrice Leblanc-Martineau – The Journal of Famous Cases (1773–1790): imagining the emergence of an alternative world through judicial storytelling
3:00 PM – Break
3:30 PM | Dreamed Worlds
- Guillaume Faroult (Louvre Museum) – The Fairy Garden: fête galante paintings and fairy tales according to Watteau and his followers
- Yuki Murayama (Keio University) – Dreaming of elsewhere: Antoine Watteau’s alternative world
October 16, 2025
9:00 AM – Welcome and breakfast
9:30 AM–12:40 PM | Morning Session
Theme: Feminist Alternatives
- Eleonora Alfano – Dom Deschamps’ alternative gender equality: an unrealized materialist feminism of the 18th century
- Ludmilla Lorrain – Feminist utopias and cooperative principles: the ideas of Anna Wheeler and Frances Wright as laboratories of alternative worlds
- 10:50 AM – Break
- Lilas Imbaud – Worlds without men and worlds without women in the fairy tales of Madame d’Aulnoy and Madame de Murat
- Xiaoxiao Wu – The Orient and the possible: testing feminine utopia in Olympe de Gouges’ The Philosopher Prince
12:40 PM – Lunch
2:00 PM–7:00 PM | Afternoon Session
Theme: Politics – Imagining Worlds
- Martin Hébert – Morian utopia in colonial Americas: reflections based on 18th-century assessments
- Daniel Nunes – Developing utopia: the case of The History of the Sevarambians
- 3:30 PM – Break
- Alex Bellemare – “Current morals are radically flawed”: history and fiction in Rétif de la Bretonne’s Singular Ideas
- Hervé Sakoum – From the Enlightenment to the shadow of Modernity: thinking history with Alejo Carpentier
5:30 PM | And Me?
Léonard-Beaulne Studio, Department of Theatre
- Amélie Trottier – Reading performance and discussion: “A Young Girl’s Utopia”
October 17, 2025
9:00 AM – Welcome and breakfast
9:30 AM–1:00 PM | Morning Session
- Anne-Lise Rey – Fictionalizing Émilie du Châtelet’s Institutions of Physics
Theme: A World Without Slavery?
- Marco Menin – A colonial world without slavery? Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s alternative plantation
- Nicole Pellegrin – Olympe de Gouges and the end of slavery: gender, race, class, religion between the 18th century and today’s readings
11:30 AM – Break
12:00 PM | Conclusions
- Sophie Audidière & Colas Duflo – Conclusions, escapes, perspectives