Pauline Guillemet has an agrégation in history and is currently preparing a thesis at Gustave-Eiffel University under the supervision of Frédéric Moret (Gustave-Eiffel University) and Étienne Anheim (EHESS). After teaching in secondary schools and at Gustave-Eiffel University, she has been an ATER at the Collège de France since September 2021, attached to Professor Patrick Boucheron's chair. Her research focuses on the social inscription of art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) within the Gothic Revival movement in the second half of the 19th century in Great Britain.
In her thesis, she examines - from John Ruskin's theoretical proposals - the construction, in the second half of the 19th century, of the intellectual category of " gothic " as a tool of social critique. At the crossroads of social history and intellectual history, she studies the social and institutional mechanisms of the author's inclusion in the bourgeois networks of art criticism. She also examines Ruskin's use of the Gothic reference, imbuing it with a socio-political significance that makes it an instrument for thinking about the social body in the second half of the 19th century in Great Britain. From the perspective of the emergence of the sociological discipline and urban planning at the end of the 19th century, she studies how the Gothic is used as a model for both thinking the social and thinking the city.
Since taking up her post as ATER at the Collège de France in September 2021, she has been editorial director of the digital magazine Entre-Temps, attached to the Patrick Boucheron Chair.
Pauline Guillemet is the winner of the Prix de la Fondation Hugot du Collège de France 2022 (proposed by Patrick Boucheron, History of Powers in Western Europe, 13th to 16th Centuries chair).