My research focuses on intermedial studies and the politics of aesthetics in literature, visual art, and music. I am particularly interested in the creation and reform of cultural-political spaces – such as the theatre, the public press, and the museum – and how these spaces are influenced by notions of representation, history, emancipation, sovereignty, and partisanship. Prioritizing a multidisciplinary approach, my projects span the human and social sciences as well as bioethics and seek to understand how and why art and politics collide. Special areas of interest include: theories and practices of intermediality; the philosophy of Jacques Rancière; interwar cultural diplomacy; early modern and modernist art, music, and literature; opera studies. Before joining the University of Montreal in 2019, I was Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria.

Philippe Despoix is an expert on 18^th-century literature and takes an interest in European scientific voyages of the Enlightenment and, in particular, as a member of the Gestes admirables research group, in the role and dissemination of engravings. He is also a specialist in 20^th-century Germanic thought, and a member of the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies, where he co-directs the PUM collection. He is also a member of the trans-Atlantic doctoral academy "Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Space."

As a member of the scientific committee of the Centre de recherche sur l'intermédialité, he collaborates with the team working on "archiving in a digital age" and directs the Intermédialités journal on the history and theory of arts and letters and techniques. His current research concerns the function of the media in memory and intercultural processes. He is preparing a book that examines the relationship between photography, anthropology and history from an intermedial perspective.