Humanities & Arts

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.

My PhD dissertation, “Visual Agency in Euclid’s Elements: A study of the transmission of visual knowledge,” explores the ways diagram makers have reproduced and translated Euclid’s diagrams over two millennia stretching from antiquity to the modern period. My visit to CNRS will allow me to investigate a core question of my project through discussions and workshops with French scholars: what is the nature of visual agency, that is, the ability of diagram makers to draw diagrams according to their discretion?

The aim of the project would be to offer a new reading of Spinoza’s Hebrew Grammar. Through an analysis of not only the grammatical rules written in Latin, but also the choice of words, the examples Spinoza uses in Hebrew in this text reveal the role of the intertext to reshape Hebrew and rationalize it. One may then ask what defines, or what are the boundaries of, language: is it the syntax, semantics, phonology and morphology of its words? There is a coherence between the words chosen as examples and the rules of the grammar.

My doctoral research deals with what philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists call the sense of reality. How does one’s mind identify what is real and what is not real? More specifically, how is it possible that, during hallucinatory episodes, some subjects come to have the sense that what they are experiencing is real? In order to investigate these questions and similar ones, I have decided to focus on a very specific kind of hallucinatory experiences, namely on psychedelicsinduced experiences.

I spent a summer in Paris conducting research on French foreign policy in sub-Saharan Africa since the end of the Cold War. My project focused on recent interventions by France in countries like Ivory Coast, Mali, and the Central African Republic. Through interviews with academics, diplomats, and other experts, I answered some basic questions about French Africa policy: Why does France continue to intervene in Africa?

Since the emergence of haute couture, Paris has conceived the world’s greatest fashion design innovation. However, as fashion innovation becomes increasingly technologydriven, Silicon Valley is carving out its own role in fashion. The results (particularly in wearable technology) are less than fashionable. The technology needs to finds aesthetic and the Parisian-based luxury fashion brands are well positioned to provide it. How can a dialogue be created between Paris and Silicon Valley in the emerging fashion-tech space?

While it began as a question of temporary resettlement and provision of basic needs for the almost 5 million refugees in key European port cities, the Syrian refugee crisis has progressed far beyond the boundaries of traditional immigration politics; it has redefined global human rights standards, strained international relations, and eroded Islamic integration progress in Western Europe.