Marcelo Hoffman and I have written a short piece for the Verso blog about Foucault’s 1971 visit to Montreal. This was Foucault’s first time in Canada, where he gave three lectures on Nietzsche at McGill University and one on Sade at the Université de Montréal. Daniel Defert recalls that Foucault also met with Quebec separatists during this visit.

While Foucault’s visits to California from 1975 until near the end of his life are well known, less well explored are his transatlantic trips before 1975. As well as McGill, Foucault visited SUNY Buffalo in spring 1970 and 1972, and Cornell University in autumn 1972. He also visited Brazil in 1965 and four times in the early-mid 1970s. 

Marcelo and I have both written about Foucault’s early visits to the Americas. Marcelo’s Foucault in Brazil: Dictatorship, Resistance, and Solidarity (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) examines his five visits there, following the earlier work of Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues in Michel Foucault au Brésil: Présence, effets, résonances, which was first published in Portuguese and then in French translation. Marcelo also wrote about the FBI file on Foucault, which explains some of the challenges he faced on his initial visits to the United States.

In 2025 I spent a few days in the archives in Buffalo. They have quite extensive files which provide a lot of detail about the two times he visited there. Unfortunately, there is no comparable archive for the McGill or Cornell visits. I discuss the Buffalo visits here and in more detail in a piece in Foucault Studies. Leonhard Riep analyses Foucault’s 1972 Buffalo course in detail in an essay in that same issue (both open access). The course has now been published as Histoire de la vérité, edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Orazio Irrera, on the basis of a complete set of tape recordings made at the time (now available online). I have also discussed the limited information about Foucault’s time at Cornell and the visit he made to Attica prison in 1972, while he was staying in Buffalo. 

Our piece on the Verso blog looks at the Montreal visit, both the academic lectures he gave and his meetings with the separatists. It is written on the basis of the sources we have been able to find, and also says what we have been unable to discover, through archival absences and state obstruction. We hope it is a useful addition to the story of Foucault in the Americas, before California.