Dr. Dominique Hétu (she/her) is a bilingual Canadian (French-English) scholar specializing in Canadian and Francophone literatures. She joined Brandon University in August 2020 and has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Francophone Studies and Languages since January 2025, serving as Department Chair since the 2025–2026 academic year. Her research brings together comparative literary and cultural studies, feminist and critical ethics of care, and a particular interest in how literature gives voice to experiences and perspectives often overlooked or marginalized in dominant cultural narratives. She examines how contemporary literary and cultural production in Québec and Canada engages with interpersonal and sociopolitical struggles, focusing on narratives of vulnerability, the politics and poetics of care, and questions of belonging, responsibility, and relationality. Her work pays particular attention to the everyday experiences of individuals and communities navigating social inequalities, marginalization, and precarious conditions. Published in both English and French, her research increasingly explores literary representations of chronic illness, persistent vulnerability, and the forms of care and responsibility that emerge when experiences resist conventional narratives of healing or resolution.

Before joining Brandon University, Dr. Hétu held a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta (2017–2020), where she also served as Assistant Teaching Professor at Campus Saint-Jean. She has taught undergraduate courses since 2008 in literary and cultural studies, French language and second-language acquisition, comparative literature, comparative stylistics, and advanced research methodologies. At Brandon University, she has developed and taught courses such as Francophone Indigenous Literatures, Issues in Teaching French in a Minority Setting, and Saving Words: Literature and Endangered Languages. These courses reflect her commitment to exploring the relationships between language, literature, culture, and power, while foregrounding Indigenous and minoritized perspectives and the importance of linguistic and cultural diversity. Her teaching philosophy is grounded in inclusive, accessible, and student-centred practices that foster curiosity, critical thinking, collaboration, and meaningful relationships in the classroom. She encourages students to explore literature and culture across linguistic, geographical, and historical boundaries, while engaging with diverse perspectives shaped by gender, race, class, language, and colonial histories. Through this approach, she seeks to create learning environments where students can develop their intellectual independence, intercultural awareness, and capacity to engage thoughtfully and responsibly with the world around them.

Dr. Hétu’s first monograph, Faire attention: Forces et écueils du care dans la littérature contemporaine au Québec, which examines the transformative and potentially damaging manifestations of care in contemporary Québec literature, is currently in final review with Presses de l’Université de Montréal (2027). She was also the lead editor of Living and Learning with Feminist Ethics, Literature, and Art (University of Alberta Press, November 2024). Her first poetry collection, Il n’y aura pas de safety word (Hurlantes éditrices, March 2025), engages critically and creatively with fatphobia, body shaming, and the politics of embodiment.

Her ongoing research is supported by several collaborative projects. She is a co-applicant on two SSHRC Insight Grants: Service et soin, sollicitude et subalter(n)ité dans les littératures francophones de 1945 à aujourd’hui ($240,000), led by Dr. Andrea Oberhuber (Université de Montréal), and L’âge du milieu : une réinvention féministe et littéraire de la « midlife crisis » au 21e siècle ($342,000, 2024–2029), led by Dr. Maïté Snauwaert (University of Alberta). These projects extend her engagement with feminist literary criticism and the politics of care, exploring how literature interrogates relations of service, dependency, gender, and the social expectations that shape experiences of vulnerability across different stages of life.

Alongside these research collaborations, Dr. Hétu is editing a French-language special issue on densités relationnelles (relational densities) for Les Cahiers franco-canadiens de l’Ouest (Université de Saint-Boniface) and preparing a co-edited collection of chapters on pedagogies of care in higher education for a Routledge companion. Both projects reflect her sustained interest in the ethical and political dimensions of relationality, as well as the possibilities and limitations of care within literary, cultural, and educational contexts.

Her current research brings the politics of care into conversation with a politics and poetics of the ordinary, focusing increasingly on chronic illness, persistent suffering, and experiences that resist conventional narratives of healing or recovery. She is particularly interested in what care entails when suffering does not resolve, when vulnerability becomes an enduring feature of everyday life, and when the work of sustaining relationships unfolds without the promise of repair.

This inquiry also informs her emerging research project, Burning Relations: Fire, Vulnerability, and Responsibility in Contemporary Francophone Literature, supported by a Brandon University Research Committee (BURC) Research Grant ($5,000). Through the literary and symbolic configurations of fire, the project investigates the entanglements of vulnerability, relational responsibility, and care's destructive and transformative potential. Together, these research and creative initiatives advance Dr. Hétu’s broader examination of how contemporary literature makes visible the ordinary, often ambivalent forms of interdependence and responsibility that shape lives marked by precarity, uncertainty, and experiences that do not necessarily heal.