Danièle Archambault, Ph. D. (Linguistics), is a researcher, author, and educator whose work explores comics and graphic novels as a means of documenting a society’s cultural and linguistic landscape. She grew up in Montreal, Quebec, where she was a tenured professor in the Linguistics Department at the Université de Montréal until 1998. She then moved to Palo Alto, California, where she worked as a consultant in speech technology.
In 2009, her long-standing interest in comics and bandes dessinées led her to take a course in graphic novel writing at Stanford University. There, she discovered visual storytelling as a new and engaging way to share her reflections on language, culture, and everyday life.
Since 2010, she has published several comic books and graphic novels. Her Stairway Stories series consists of three bilingual (French–English) flip-over books: In the Montreal of My Childhood (2010), On the Way to School (2010), and The Age of Reason (2011). Through both text and drawings, these stories documents, with emotion and humor, Québec culture and the French dialect spoken in the province.
In Québec–California (2012), available in print and as a multi-touch e-book, she narrates her adventures and misadventures with California wildlife. Une année sans alcool. Le journal de Catherine (Vol. 1) (2014) is a 124-page, full-color graphic novel that humorously chronicles a woman’s journey into sobriety while critically examining society’s role in the pervasive problem of alcoholism in society. The work is also available as a webcomic and is currently being adapted into English as A Year Without a Drink. Her second graphic novel, Une année de célébrations (2017), is a 125-page graphic novel, documenting the evolution of major celebrations in Québec society since the 1950s. In November 2020, she released Le Calendrier de l’Avent et du temps des Fêtes, a collection of texts, comics, and illustrations for the holiday season.
Ms. Archambault has participated in solo and juried group exhibitions in Canada and the United States. Her artwork includes series of drawings and paintings created using traditional media, such as watercolor, pastels, and colored pencils, as well as digital art produced with a graphic tablet and computer. From 2014 to 2022, she was an artist-in-residence in the Cubberley Studio Artist Program, a program of the City of Palo Alto. Her recent projects include The Art of Procrastination, Life on Their Own, and adaptations of selected fables by La Fontaine.
Since 2013, she has taught courses in visual storytelling at the Palo Alto Art Center and other educational venues. She is a frequent guest speaker on documenting culture and dialects through comics, addressing audiences from primary school to university level. She regularly attends international conferences on comic studies and participates in comic art festivals in both Canada and the United States.
In 2015, she founded the Graphic Novel Book Club at the Palo Alto Library for adult readers, which she has facilitated monthly ever since. Deeply committed to French language and culture, she is also the co-founder, along with Anne Dumontier, of the Northern California educational program French Language and Culture Through Comics.Through her creative, scholarly, and pedagogical work, Danièle Archambault acts as a cultural mediator, creating spaces where art, language, and lived experience intersect.
List of comic books and graphic novels with ISBN numbers
A Year Without a Drink (Translation of La Sobriété volontaire. Une année sans alcool, to be published 2026). Currently a webcomic.
Rire Sous Masque: Capsules Humoristiques de la Vie Durant la Pandémie (2022), 48 p. Album couleur .978-0-9896932-9-5
Smiling Through the Mask: A Collection of Humorous Cartoons about Life During the COVID-19 Pandemic (2022), 48 p. Album couleur. 978-0-9896932-8-8
Smiling through the mask: A traveling book (2021), 48 p. Album couleur. ISBN: 978-0-9896932-7-1
Calendrier de l’Avent et du temps des Fêtes (2020), 84 p. Color. ISBN : 978-0-9896932-6-4
Une année de célébrations. Histoires d’escaliers (2017),112pp. ISBN 978-0-9896932-2-6
La sobriété volontaire. Une année sans alcool. (2015), 196pp. ISBN 978-0-9896932-2-6
Une année sans alcool: Les quatre premiers mois (2014), 128pp. ISBN 978-0-9896932-1-9
Québec-California. La vie qui bat. The wild life (iBook) (2013) ISBN 978-0-9896932-0-2
Québec-California. La vie qui bat. The wild life (2012) 90 pages. ISBN 978-0-615-64470-7
Histoires d’escaliers – Stairway Stories. L’Âge de Raison-The Age of Reason (2011) ISBN 978-0-615-53076-5
Histoires d’escaliers – Stairway Stories. Sur le chemin des écoliers. On the way to school (2011) ISBN 978-0-615-46641-5
Histoires d’escaliers – Stairway Stories. Dans le Montréal de mon enfance. In the Montreal of my childhood (2010) ISBN 978-0-615-39167-0
Daniele! These are wonderful. Make me think of the Madeline books and also TinTin. Brava!
Thank you Anne!
I’ve very much enjoyed your stories of life growing up in Montreal. They make me think of my own childhood growing up at about the same time in a small city in the US where a large French Canadian population brought their language and culture to all aspects of the community. I attended a French Catholic school during my childhood there, so the scenes in your “sur le chemin des ecoliers” is especially entertaining and very reminiscent of my own life as a pupil of the Sisters of the Presentation of Mary. Thanks for the enjoyment your stories provide, and especially for your glossary explanations of the Canadian French dialect that you add each of your bandes!
This is great! I am glad you are enjoying my stories and that they remind you of your childhood. I am especially happy that you can relate to the stories although We grew up in different countries, speaking a different language in school. Some of our childhood experiences were the same. Danièle