Leonard Eugene Doucette

Emeritus Professor of French and Drama, Univ. of Toronto.
Author of three books and more than 100 articles on the history of French and French-Canadian literature, with special reference to theatre.

Of Acadian extraction, Doucette graduated from St. Thomas University in New Brunswick with specialization in Philosophy and English(1955), then attended King's College, University of London (1955-58) on a Lord Beaverbrook Scholarship, studying Modern Languages. On his return, he taught languages at St. Thomas before entering the Ph.D. programme at Brown University, Providence RI, receiving his Ph.D. in French and Spanish in 1967, elected to Phi Beta Kappa the same year.

After two years as Asst. Professor at University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), he returned to Canada in 1967, and remained at University of Toronto until retirement in 1998. In 1970 he published Emery Bigot: Seventeenth-Century Humanist, in 1984 Theatre in French Canada: Laying the Foundations, 1606-1867, and in 1997 The Drama of Our Past: Major Plays from Nineteenth-Century Quebec. Associate Editor of The University of Toronto Quarterly and Co-Editor of Theatre Research in Canada, his articles on French Canadian theatre have been published in many refereed journals, and in encyclopedic works such as the Cambridge Guide to World Theatre; The Blackwell Companion to Twentieth-Century Theatre; Contemporary World Writers; The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre; Canadian Drama; The Dictionary of Literary Biography; The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance; The Classical Tradition and the Americas; and The Canadian Encyclopedia.