Schwartzwald's research focusses on a number of interrelated topics : the interface between discourses of national modernity on the one hand and literary and cultural modernites on the other; nationalisms and sexualities, and especially the ways in which homosexuality figures in national, colonial, and post-colonial discourses; interfaces between political notions of citizenship privileged by the nation state and the assertion of other identitarian positions on a transnational scale; literary discourse and the dissemination of notions of " civility " and " density " in heterogenous, urban spaces. His primary sites of investigation have been Quebec, Canada, la francophonie, France between the two world wars and post-1968, and the " small nations " of western and central Europe.