Yolande Grisé

Early Life and Education

Yolande Grisé was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1944 to Albert Arthur Grisé and Gertrude Tougas. She has four sisters, Suzanne, Dolorès, Lilianne and Francine. Grisé attended the Collège Marie-Anne secondary school in Montreal, graduating in 1964. The following year she studied at the Université de Montréal, acquiring a Bachelor of Physical Education, and obtained a teaching certificate class “A” from Quebec’s Ministry of Education. Upon graduation, she worked as a teacher at the Montreal Catholic School Commission between 1965 and 1968.

She spent the following three years studying at Université Laval in Quebec City and graduated in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts. Grisé then moved to Paris and studied at Sorbonne University, completing her Master of Arts in 1972. She completed her PhD in Latin studies at Sorbonne University in 1977. During her studies, Grisé also worked at the University of Ottawa, where she taught part-time as a literature professor (1976–79); she was also the school’s first coordinator of Franco-Ontarian literature courses (1976).

Career Highlights

Between 1978 and 1979, Grisé taught part-time in the Department of History at Université Laval. In 1980, she began working full-time for the University of Ottawa in the French literature department. In 1983, she supervised the first doctoral thesis on French literature at the University of Ottawa.

Grisé was director of the Centre for Research on French Canadian Culture/Le Centre de recherche en civilization canadienne-française (CRCCF) at the University of Ottawa from 1985 to 1997. In this role, she led the first in-depth research into Franco-Ontario visual arts (1986–88). Throughout her tenure, the future of the CRCCF became uncertain as it faced severe budget cuts, external evaluations, administrative changes and a proposed merger with the university’s Institute of Canadian Studies. However, the centre survived these challenges due to sustained pressure from the Franco-Ontario community.

Between 1986 and 2000, Grisé conducted extensive research on French-Canadian poetry written before 1867. This research culminated in a twelve-volume publication, Poetic texts of French Canada, 1607–1867, co-authored by Jeanne d'Arc Lortie with contributions by Pierre Savard and Paul Wyczynski. Much of the research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

In 2005, Grisé became director of the new Office of Francophone and Francophile Affairs at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Grisé’s first objective in this role was to triple the number of student enrollments in SFU’s new fully bilingual degree program in public administration and community services. SFU was the first university in British Columbia to offer a bilingual degree. Grisé held this direction position for three years and in 2008 became an associate professor in the Faculty of Humanities at SFU.

Organizations

Since the 1990s, Yolande Grisé has been a member of academic and professional organizations such as the Committee for French in the Acadian and Francophone Communities of Canada, Conseil de la langue française du Québec, the Society of Ancient Studies of Quebec, the Society of Latin Studies in Paris, France, and the Society of French-speaking academics of Ontario.

Personal Life

Yolande Grisé is married to Duncan Cameron, an author, professor and academic in political sciences and finance.

Appointments, Honours and Awards

In 1991, Yolande Grisé was appointed chair of the Ontario Cultural Policy Task Force, for which she developed the first cultural policy for Francophones living in Ontario. She was also selected president of the Ontario Arts Council (1991–94), at which she promoted the arts and art accessibility. Grisé was president of the Royal Society of Canada between 2011 and 2013.

Grisé has received numerous awards, including election to the Academy of Letters and Human Sciences of the Royal Society of Canada (1996), induction into the Order of the Pléiade, an honorary order of the International Organization of La Francophone (1998) and the Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee Medal in Ottawa (2002). In 2015, she became a Member of the Order of Canada.

Publications

• Le suicide dans la Rome antique (1982)
• Poetic texts from French Canada, 1606-1867, 12 vols. (1987–2000), with Jeanne d'Arc Lortie, Pierre Savard and Paul Wyczynski
• Poems by François-Xavier Garneau (2012), co-edited by Paul Wyczynski