The Collegium de Lyon seminar

In this talk, I show how it is that reflection on habit leads to reflection on time as duration, and how it is possible to argue that, at bottom, time is really the most fundamental form of habit.

How are migration issues tackled during municipal elections? What does the health crisis, which meanwhile became a political crisis, teach us about such issues?

According to the main thesis of L’Esprit de Spinoza, religions were always used as instruments of political domination. In the Mémoire of Meslier, an author who agrees with this thesis, the situation seems to be different because, according to the priest, ignorance and superstition play a very important role not only among the dominated, but also among some of those who exercise power.

Liberalism is a response to the theologico-political problem which produced religious and political divisions in early modern Europe

The region is currently undergoing major changes at the political, economic, social and cultural-technological levels. The question we will try to answer is the following: To what extent, and in what ways, could culture, as a cross-cutting tool for sustainable development, be a driving force in the reshaping of cultural policies in the region?

The French higher education system is original in that it is not, as in most other countries, built around the hegemony of the university model, to which even specific establishments, such as engineering schools or business schools, rallied.

How to react to terrorist attacks? The question is not only important in today’s political debates about how to ‘fight’, and how not to fight, terrorism, but has been so since terrorism emerged as a peculiar form of political violence in the 19th century.

Dyslexia is the most common, language-based, learning disorder and one of its most pervasive manifestations is weak spelling skills. Many individuals with dyslexia also have poorly legible and disfluent handwriting, handwriting being a skill of the motor domain.

The inclusion of migrants in a society is a key mechanism to the pathway towards the promotion of overall health and well-being, social cohesion, and political participation.

What is the status of French & Francophone Studies (FFS) at American colleges and universities?

The revolutionary poet Vladimir Maiakovskii set out to write a commemorative poem after Lenin’s death, completing it almost a year later. His poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was published by Leningrad’s State Publishing House (Gosizdat) as a separate edition in February 1925, featuring no illustrations. It remains a question of what kind of cinépoetry book it would be had it been accompanied by a series of photomontages that the two constructivist graphic artists, Sergei Senkin and Gustav Klutsis, created soon after, inspired by Maikovskii’s verses. The talk represents a quest for the cinépoetry book’s spectral materiality.

We will study the role of environment, geography and landscape, in general, in the process of emergence and production of meaning for signs in the early Bronze Age and Iron Age societies in Mesopotamia, Southwestern Iranian Plateau and the Nile Valley from a comparative perspective. To do this the most prominent and common symbols from these regions are selected and the process, since their very early representation in artworks to the production of meaning for them have been studied from a semiotic perspective. The results of this study demonstrates that there is a close relationship between the symbols as well as the meaning and significance they convey in various societies.

The most prominent archaeological site at the foothills of the Kopetdag Mountains is containing the ruins of two fortresses: Old and New Nisa. They are situated in the south-west of Ashgabat. Old Nisa was the residence (or ceremonial centre) of the kings of the Parthian Empire from the Arsacid dynasty (the mid 3rd century BCE to the early 3rd century CE) and New Nisa, 1.5 km to the north-west of Old Nisa, was representing the adjacent city.

We will present a methodological and theoretical framework for the study of large collections of visual materials. Our framework, distant viewing, is distinguished from other approaches by making explicit the interpretive nature of extracting semantic metadata from images. In other words, one must ‘view’ visual materials before studying them.

This project explores how the experimental styles and narrative ethos of authors of the French Nouveau Roman influenced Maghrebi authors of French expression from the late 1950s to the present post-postcolonial era.

This presentation aims to provide an overview of the resettlement and the reception of exiles in French cities since 2015. After a brief contextualization of the so-called "refugee crisis," Dr. Aude-Claire Fourot will present preliminary results on the local impacts of international migration.

Based on her qualitative and quantitative data collection thus far, she will highlight the precursory conditions that drive migration, and how post-migration, paradoxically, certain migrant groups are exposed to increased health risks and negative health outcomes.

The presentation, based on the forthcoming book Unmaking Americans, describes the history of citizenship stripping in the United States through the voices of those who lost their citizenship.

My project concerns accounts of the nature of habit in the history of modern French philosophy since 1800. Throughout this period of French thought, habit is a pivotal philosophical and metaphysical question. The issue of habit concerns not just the nature of mind, but also how we conceive nature itself. Competing schools of thought throughout the period not only offer diverging views on habit, but also define and establish themselves in doing so.

This presentation is based on the first chapter of Sonia Mbarek-Rais‘s study project "Culture, politics and democracy in the Maghreb, issues, challenges and perspectives".

The aim of this project is an in-depth review of the HBV and HDV variants infecting the Americas and evaluate their pathogenicity in terms of severe presentations of these diseases. In addition, a devastating HIV epidemic affecting Warao Amerindians from the Orinoco Delta will also be described.

This presentation, based on the first chapter of Ming Chong's project, is an analysis of nature and history in Montesquieu's thought. History is the main tool in the knowledge of modernity for Montesquieu. He is not, however, an historian or a positivist because he measures the history by the nature or the universal principles. Yet, the nature of the human being shows three aspects in Montesquieu. The interactions and tensions between the physical nature, the moral nature and the social nature illustrated by history are the key to understanding both the diversity and the universality of humanity. They also shed light on the legitimacy and ambiguity of modernity presented by Montesquieu.

This talk will provide a general introduction to the diverse relations between the military and the theater in the French-speaking world from Louis XIV’s reign to Napoleon’s final defeat. Grounded in theater and performance studies and in the cultural history of the military, I provide a holistic examination of theater’s roles in creating early modern military cultures and of the military’s influence in changing the norms of dramatic literature and theatrical performance.

Jean Meslier (1664-1729), priest of Etrépigny, left at his death a manuscript in which he develops an atheistic and materialistic philosophy. In general, my current research concerns the genesis, meaning and reception of Meslier’s thought. In particular, I propose to offer an interpretation of Meslier’s Mémoire des pensées et des sentiments (ca. 1729) from a specific point of view: the radical antagonism between the concepts of bon sens / droite raison and foi / créance aveugle.

In the late 19th century Europe experienced an unprecedented wave of political assassination attempts and bomb attacks. These were mostly committed by anarchists under the term ‘propaganda by the deed’ and are often considered as the prototype of modern terrorism. The attacks failed to achieve their goal of mobilising the working classes, but they had a huge impact on the political space, notably due to the late 19th century media revolution.

Weapons are one of the many findings in archaeological excavations. The extant archaeological literature has mainly focused on traditional studies of these weapons, such as typological and comparative studies. These studies are limited in that they only allow for typo-chronological information. However, when a systematic and multidisciplinary perspective is adopted to study weapons, this method contributes to extensive information about the societies in ancient times that used these weapons.

The Neolithic Dzheitun culture (ca 6300 - 4500 BC), the period of the origin and early development of agricultural economies in Western Central Asia, was followed by the Chalcolithic Anau and Namazga cultures. The names of these cultures came from the names of two archaeological sites in southern Turkmenistan. The period Anau IA (4500 - ca 4000 BC) was period of the Neolithic to Chalcolithic transition in this region. For the history of Western Central Asia, this was a major era of social transformation caused by the technological change (e.g. introduction of irrigation farming, metallurgy), which allowed increasing economic production and exchange in turn leading to social stratification (i.e., the formation of “elites”). The main elements of the Dzheitun culture disappeared.

In 1924 the self-taught artist Iurii Nikolaevich Rozhkov created a series of photomontages inspired by Vladimir Maiakovskii’s propagandistic ode to labor, “To the Workers of Kursk,” and the geological discovery of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly (KMA), the biggest iron-ore basin in the world. The series was first shown at the “Twenty Years of Work” exhibition in January 1930, which the poet himself curated. In the exhibition catalogue, Maiakovskii made note of Rozhkov’s work as: “A temporary monument. Rozhkov’s montages. To be printed.” Two months after the exhibition Maiakovskii committed suicide. Rozhkov’s photomontages remained unpublished during his lifetime.

Most European languages use alphabetic orthographies, and these can vary extensively in their transparency, or letter-sound consistency. An important question in cross-linguistic research on literacy development considers the impact that orthographic consistency may have on the neuropsychological predictors as well as on the patterns of alphabetic spelling development.

Exploratory research in the sciences and social sciences has increasingly turned to the analysis of large textual data sources. Common examples include electronic medical records, social media posts, online reviews, and digitized collections of books and periodicals.

Ancient Athens developed democracy to a higher level than any other state before modern times. It was the leading cultural innovator of its age. Athens is rightly revered for its political and cultural achievements. Less well known is this state’s extraordinary record of military success. Athens transformed ancient warfare and became one of the ancient world’s superpowers.