Jean Winand holds a doctorate in oriental philology (1989) and an agrégation de l'enseignement supérieur (2002). He has held the chair in Ancient Egyptian language, literature and writing at the University of Liège since 2006, after working for more than fifteen years as a researcher at the Fonds national de la recherche scientifique. He was Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at ULiège (2010-2017) and First Vice-Rector of ULiège (2018-2022).
A member of the Royal Academy of Belgium (elected in 2017), he holds a UNESCO Chair " For an open science ! Humanities at the crossroads of interdisciplinarity " (since 2021).
His main areas of interest are the languages of Pharaonic Egypt, mainly Classical Egyptian and Neo-Egyptian, the philological and literary study of texts, writing systems and lexical semantics. He is the initiator of the Ramsès project, a database of Neo-Egyptian texts, which he co-directs with Stéphane Polis (FNRS - ULiège). The only one of its kind, this database makes it possible to carry out complex searches to answer grammatical, lexical and philological questions. More recently, he has been focusing on the reception of hieroglyphic writing from the Renaissance to the end of the 18th century, with particular attention to the work of Jesuit Father Athanase Kircher. In this context, he was the general curator of an exhibition he organized in partnership with the Curtius museum to mark the bicentenary of Jean-François Champollion's decipherment (2022).
His honors include the annual prize of the Royal Academy of Belgium (1988), the five-year Alumni Award of the Belgian University Foundation (1998) and the Anneliese Maier Prize of the von Humboldt Foundation (2015). The recipient of several Belgian honors, he is also a chevalier dans l'ordre des Palmes académiques (2015).
His main monographs are Études de néo-égyptien. 1. La morphologie verbale (Liège, 1992), Grammaire raisonnée de l'égyptien classique (Liège, 1999, with Michel Malaise), Temps et aspect en égyptien ancien (Brill, Leyde-Boston, 2006), Les Hiéroglyphes (Paris, Que-sais-je?, 2013), Les Pharaons. Une histoire personnelle (Paris, PUF, 2017), L'Université à la croisée des chemins (Bruxelles, Académie royale, 2018), Les Hiéroglyphes en Europe avant Champollion. From Classical Antiquity to the Egyptian Expedition (Liège, 2022, with Gaëlle Chantrain).
