Conference/round table of Roger Chartier titled "What do the historians think about?", on Monday May 6th 2013 at 6:00 pm in amphitheater Simone Weil

"This lecture will be based on the new book A quoi pensent les historiens? Faire de l’histoire au XXIe siècle, edited by Christophe Granger and published by Autrement. It will be followed by a debate, notably with Ibrahima Thioub et Perry Anderson. This debate will be closely related to the challenges made to Histoire by those outside the academic field: the beginning of the digital era, which have transformed not only the conditions of research, but also the relationship with the reader; and the « crisis » of publishing that follows it; or even more, the multiplication of the social uses of History that became a collective hobby or a demand of memory. Other challenges are placed on the intellectual or scientific fields: the appropriation of the historical objects by the cognitive sciences and the neurosciences, these sciences have proposed a «biological turning point » and they have given to the brain’s areas and connections a status of universal constants; the tension between the morphological relations and the historical transmissions, which is a key question to the connected Historians; and also, the actual relation between the Historians and the « literature ». It is not about the rhetoric dimension or the narrative of writing history, neither to identify what is fictional in the archives, but to use the methods of writing that were traditionally forbidden to this discipline. However, the need of establishing a set of knowledge specific to History remains. This set of knowledge will always be written from unique perspectives, but it will also always be submitted to the rules of production and validation that are specific to the knowledge and that impose themselves to all of those which practice these rules."

Roger Chartier

Download the poster and the flyer of the lecture 

Roger Chartier is a Professor at the Collège de France, he is a Director of Studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, and he is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvanie.

His subject of research is the History of the Written Culture at the Modern Times.

His most recent books are:

 Inscrire et effacer. Culture écrite et littérature (XIe-XVIIIe siècle), Paris, Gallimard et Le Seuil, 2005 ;

Écouter les morts avec les yeux, Fayard, 2008 ; 

Cardenio entre Shakespeare et Cervantès. Histoire d’une pièce perdue, Paris, Gallimard, 2011 ;

The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind, Cambridge, Polity Press, automne 2013 [à paraître].

 He is one of the producers of the showLes lundis de l’histoire broadcasted by France Culture.