Professor in the Department of French-Language Literature at the University of Montreal since 2003, Francis Gingras completed his doctoral thesis in medieval literature at the University of Montpellier, where he taught from 1995 to 1997, before serving as a teaching and research fellow at the Faculty of Bayonne, and subsequently as an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario.
His main research focuses on the history of the imagination and the development of the novel as a genre in the Middle Ages. He is the author, amongst other works, of Érotisme et merveilles dans le récit français des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Paris, Champion, 2002), Miroir du français: éléments pour une histoire culturelle de la langue française (Montréal, Paragraphe, 2007; new edition, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014), Le Bâtard conquérant: essor et expansion du genre romanesque au Moyen Âge (Paris, Champion, 2011; 2nd edition 2017), Profession médiéviste (Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014) and numerous articles, notably on issues relating to the compilation of collections within the culture of the manuscript book. In 2021, he published a new edition of the Deuxième Continuation du Conte du Graal, accompanied by a translation into modern French prepared in collaboration with Marie-Louise Ollier (La Deuxième Continuation du Conte du Graal, edited, introduced and annotated by Francis Gingras, translated by Francis Gingras and Marie-Louise Ollier, Paris, Champion, 2021).