“Imaginer les communautés” studies the relationships between perceptions of identity—be they political, social, linguistic, cultural, religious, geographic, transnational, national or local, from the 16th century to the present day—and the communities from which they originate and by which these communities are moulded. Emphasis is placed on the imagination’s creative power in order to define and model communities whose realities, although the direct product of social interactions, also stem from culturally-specific symbolic worlds.

The projects developed by “Imaginer les communautés” are all steeped in the history and culture of English-speaking countries and their respective literature. They are conducted from a diachronic as well as a synchronic perspective. They may include the study of one’s rootedness in one’s own space as much as a transcultural approach of the way English-speaking social imaginaries relate to other spaces and cultures. These projects place particular emphasis on the links and connections between communities whose imagining depends on their awareness of one another as communities of class, language and race, as communities within wider society ; and as micro- and macro-communities of political, intellectual, cultural or religious thought. The phenomena of imaginative transfers, reinvestment and transformation of imaginations from one community to another, whether viewed synchronically or diachronically, are therefore central to our research.