Humanities & Arts

Over the past decade there has been a rapid growth in the use of X-ray imaging techniques to study cultural heritage and related fields including art, archaeology and paleontology. Yet with the field still in its infancy there is a lack of communication and multidisciplinary in-depth interaction of the X-ray science and cultural heritage communities. With literally tens of thousands of heritage artefacts yet to be identified and studied the potential for the use of nondestructive X-ray imaging techniques, coupled to adapted data processing approaches, is tremendous.

Two Persian Gulf states, mainly Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have managed during the last decade to diversify their image in the West through culture. They are not anymore only associated to oil in the Western media. Besides a new regional contemporary art market based in Dubai, museums have been playing a major role in this process. The most publicized among them are the Louvre and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, based on partnerships with world-renowned American and French institutions: The Louvre Museum in Paris and the Guggenheim Foundation in New York.

This 
is 
a comparative 
cultural
 project 
that
 examines 
the
 evolvement
 of 
Paris
 in to
 the 
capital 
of
 the 
modern
 world 
in 
the
 nineteenth
 and
 twentieth 
centuries,
 especially
 the 
city's
 treatment
 of
 its 
historic
heritage 
in 
light
 of
 modernization:
 museums,
 monuments,
 and
 vernacular
 districts.

As one of the category of World Heritage, as the intervention between human and nature, cultural landscape has complicated geography and cultural background; under the influence of the socio-economic and political changes, evolving is one of the important features of cultural landscape, so the controversy and contradictions are always exist during the planning and management of site, such as the relocation of indigenous people, excessive tourism development, the loss of intangible cultural heritage, etc.

My research aims to explain the reasons and conditions of the renewal of the aesthetic reflection on the concept of “Imagination” in interwar France. Considering the different theories of imagination elaborated by authors such as Gaston Bachelard, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roger Caillois, and Armand Petitjean and their mutual relations, I wish to analyze the role of this complex and multifaceted notion in the cultural context of the period.

I researched the philosophy of Henri Bergson, the way in which it influenced American philosophers and the reception of Bergson's philosophy in the U.S. at the Library of Congress. This research culminated in an honors thesis which I wrote in the Philosophy Department and in a finalized English translation of Henri Bergson's Durée et simultanéité which I wrote as a thesis for the French Department.

The United Nation Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is Paris-based specialized agency of the UN, whose task is to create the conditions for dialogue among civilizations based upon respect for commonly shared values. While at the beginning UNESCO was known for its programs on education, in the past decades the international protection of heritage, know as World Heritage, has become its flagship program.

My research focuses on the emigration of WWI Irish ex-servicemen in the United States in the 1920s. At the end of the First World War, hundreds of demobilized Irish veterans left their country and settled in the United States in order to escape unemployment and harassment from the Irish Republican Army. While writing a new chapter of the history of the Irish diaspora in the United States, I intend to develop a comparative study on the demobilization of disabled French and American WWI ex-servicemen, focusing more particularly on the clinical/psychological aspect of their homecoming.

Raising on October 17, 2012 in Paris the question: “What is Heidegger the thinker of?”, I began a dialogue with Prof. Thomas Sheehan from Stanford University, who asked on 9 October 2013 in Lancaster: “What, after all, was Heidegger about?”. This question takes on a new relevance as the publication of Heidegger’s collected works enters into its final phase.

My visit to Stanford provides an opportunity to develop collaborative research between Stanford and the Sorbonne in the field of Art History and Chinese Art studies. My research field is the history of Chinese architecture and the art of gardens and landscape architecture (15th-20th centuries). Related fields of interest include the study of landscape painting, interior design and the production and use of furniture. The focus of my research is to study how interior space and gardens interact.