Colloquium organized by Professors Antoine Compagnon, Chair of Modern and Contemporary French Literature: History, Criticism, Theory (2005-2020), and Thomas Römer, Chair of The Hebrew Bible and its Contexts, as part of the "Passage des disciplines" program.
This colloquium is the fifth in the series of colloquia organized as part of the " Passage des disciplines " program. Previous colloquia have examined the negative or positive receptions, at the Collège de France and beyond, of certain "founders of discursivity", Freud (2016), Darwin (2017), Einstein (2018) and Durkheim (2019). This colloquium will explore how religion has played a role in the establishment, its administration and the renewal of professorships, both in terms of the evolution of disciplines and the choice of candidates. This applies not only to chairs linked to the history of religions, taught without any religious affiliation, but also to those that gave rise to sometimes harsh debates, particularly at the time of the separation of Church and State, in various disciplines, and for scientific and/or political reasons, for example the succession of Jules Oppert, Professor of Assyrian Philology and Archaeology (1874-1905), analyzed by Dominique Charpin during the study day on the 150 years of the EPHE: Vincent Scheil obtained the majority of votes at the assembly, but was not appointed following an intervention by the Minister, as he was a Dominican.
This will provide an opportunity to observe the interventions of the tutelle in the renewal of professorships, interventions which may have accelerated the modernization of the subjects taught, and to shed light on the institutional history of the Collège in the context of higher education in the 19th and 20thcenturies . Our symposium will focus on the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies , after recalling the link between biblical studies and the founding of the Collège.
Passage des disciplines: histoire globale du Collège de France, XIXe-XXe siècle looks at the evolution of the subjects taught at the Collège de France, as well as those that were not admitted, or were admitted with difficulty, from the end of the 18th century to the 1960s. The program has received financial support from the Fondation Hugot, the Fondation du Collège de France, and PSL Research University (2016-2019).