For this new academic year, the Collège de France welcomes seven new professors (Samantha Besson, François-Xavier Fauvelle, Marc Henneaux, William Marx, Lluis Quintana-Murci, François Recanati and Luigi Rizzi) and five visiting professors (Bảo Châu Ngô, international chair; Yadh Ben Achour, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, Didier Fassin and Walter Fontana, annual chairs).
Presentations and background...
Born in 1973, Samantha Besson is Professor of International and European Law at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). She has been co-director of the European Law Institute since 2005, after spending many years as a doctoral researcher and then post-doctoral fellow at Oxford University. Her research and publications focus on general international law, EU institutional law and legal philosophy, with a particular emphasis on human rights law and theory. A visiting professor at Duke Law School, Catolica Global School of Law in Lisbon, Harvard Law School and Penn Law School, she has also provided various lectures for The Hague Academy of International Law. Since 2017, she has been a committee member of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences.
As of the start of the 2019 academic year, Samantha Besson will occupy the International Law of Institutions chair and give her first lecture entitled "Diligence and negligence in international law".
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Born in 1968, François-Xavier Fauvelle holds a doctorate in history from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and is CNRS research director at the TRACES laboratory of the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès. Initially a historian specializing in South Africa in the modern and contemporary periods, he became interested in the relationship between historical and archaeological data for earlier periods, implementing several medieval archaeology and history programs, notably in Ethiopia and Morocco. He is the author of some twenty books, including Le Rhinocéros d'or. Histoires du Moyen Âge africain (Alma, 2013), translated into ten languages and winner of the Grand Prix des Rendez-vous de l'histoire.
From the start of the 2019 academic year, François-Xavier Fauvelle will occupy the History and Archaeology of African Worlds chair and give lectures on medieval African worlds.
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After a doctorate at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and extended stays in the United States (at Princeton University and Texas University in Austin), Marc Henneaux was a researcher at the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium) and has been a professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles since 1993. In 2004, he was appointed Director of the Solvay Institutes of Physics and Chemistry. He is a specialist in gravitation, known in particular for his work on the symmetries of Einstein's theory. In 2009, he was awarded the Humboldt Research Prize.
Elected to the Fields, Strings and Gravity chair, Marc Henneaux will give a lecture on the Hidden Symmetries of Gravitation at the start of the 2019 academic year.
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Born in 1966, William Marx is Professor of Comparative Literatures at the University of Paris Nanterre. He is also an honorary member of the Institut universitaire de France and the Institut d'études avancées de Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). He is the author of several books, most of which have been published by Éditions de Minuit and translated into several languages, including Vie du lettré, awarded the Prix Montyon by the Académie française in 2010.
William Marx will take up the Comparative Literatures chair in September 2019. His lecture will be entitled "Construire, déconstruire la bibliothèque".
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Lluis Quintana-Murci was born in Palma de Mallorca (Spain) in 1970. He holds a PhD in human genetics from the University of Pavia (Italy), and is Director of Research at the CNRS, where he heads the Human Evolutionary Genetics Unit at the Institut Pasteur. His research focuses on the diversity of the human genome and its evolution, both from a fundamental point of view and as applied to the understanding of certain pathologies. His work has been recognized by a number of awards, including the CNRS bronze and silver medals, the Prix Jean Hamburger from the City of Paris, and the Prix Mergier-Bourdeix and Prix Dagnan-Bouveret from the Académie des Sciences.
Lluis Quintana-Murci has been appointed Chair of Human Genomics and Evolution from the start of the 2019 academic year. His lecture will focus on human evolution and population genetics.
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Born in 1952, François Recanati is Director of Research at the CNRS and Director of Studies at the EHESS. A specialist in analytic philosophy, he has taught at numerous universities abroad, including Berkeley, Harvard, Geneva and St. Andrews. Author of a dozen books and numerous articles on the philosophy of language and mind, he has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Stockholm University, a silver medal from the CNRS and an ERC senior fellowship. François Recanati is a member of the Academia Europaea, and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
François Recanati will take up the Philosophy of Language and Mind Chair at the start of the 2019 academic year.
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Born in 1952 in Genoa, Italy, Luigi Rizzi is Professor of Linguistics at the Universities of Siena and Geneva, where he directs the ERC project Syntactic Cartography and Locality in Adult Grammar and Language Acquisition. He is a corresponding member of the British Academy (UK), a member of the Academia Europaea, and an honorary international member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His main field of research is syntax theory and comparative syntax. In particular, he has contributed to the development of the parametric approach to comparative linguistics, the theory of locality and the study of syntactic mapping.
Luigi Rizzi will take up the General Linguistics chair in September 2019. Son lecture will focus on linguistic representations and the mechanisms that generate them.
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Born in Vietnam in 1972, Bảo Châu Ngô completed all his university studies in France. In 1992, he entered the École Normale Supérieure, before obtaining a doctorate in mathematics from the Université Paris-Sud in 1997. A CNRS research fellow, he then returned to teach at Université Paris-Sud. Since 2010, he has held a Distinguished Professorship at the University of Chicago. Known for forging new geometric tools called the "fundamental lemma" in the Langlands program to successfully treat harmonic analysis problems, Bảo Châu Ngô has won numerous international prizes, including the Fields Medal in 2010.
In 2019-2020, Bảo Châu Ngô will be giving lectures on the functional equation of automorphic L-functions as part of the Automorphic Forms International Chair.
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Professor Yadh Ben Achour was born on June1, 1945 in La Marsa. He studied law in Tunis and Paris, before obtaining his doctorate in public law in 1974. A member of the Tunisian Constitutional Council, he resigned in 1992. From 1993 to 1999, he was Dean of the Faculty of Legal Sciences at Carthage University. After the Tunisian revolution, Yadh Ben Achour was appointed President of the High Instance of the Revolution. He is a member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
In 2019-2020, Yadh Ben Achour will hold the annual Francophone Worlds Chair, in partnership with the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, with a lecture entitled "Les révolutions dans la pensée et dans l'histoire".
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Jean-Philippe Bouchaud was born in 1962. An alumnus of the École normale supérieure, he is Chairman and Chief Research Officer of Capital Fund Management. A specialist in the statistical physics of disordered media, he is one of the pioneers of "econophysics", a discipline that seeks to apply the concepts and methods of physics to economic systems and financial markets. He is the author of over 350 scientific publications, including several books and journal articles. He was awarded a CNRS silver medal in 1996 and the "Quant of the Year" award in 2017 and 2018. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 2018.
In 2019-2020, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud will hold the annual Technological Innovation Liliane Bettencourt Chair. He will hold a lecture entitled "From statistical physics to the social sciences: the challenges of multidisciplinarity".
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©Jürgen-Bauer
Didier Fassin is Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Director of Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. A physician, sociologist and anthropologist, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Anthropology at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2015. He is also the first social scientist to receive the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award, which recognizes innovative ideas and approaches involving interdisciplinary collaboration. Didier Fassin is the author of some thirty books, translated into eight languages, including Punir. Une passion contemporaine and La Vie. Mode d'emploi critique.
His lecture entitled "Une anthropologie politique et morale" (A political and moral anthropology) will be given, from the start of the 2019 academic year, as part of the annual Santé publique chair in partnership with the national agency Santé publique France.
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Walter Fontana studied chemistry in Vienna, finishing with a doctoral thesis based on a numerical analysis of the intrinsic folding characteristics of RNA. He continued his research at Los Alamos and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, where he developed a keen interest in computer science, the prism through which it is possible to understand biology. He spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton in the Theoretical Biology Program, then joined the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School.
The annual Computer Sciences and Digital Sciences Chair, in partnership with Inria, has been entrusted to him for the 2019-2020 academic year. His lecture will focus on information biology - a dialogue between computer science and biology.
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