Patrick Boucheron

A historian who is considered to be one of the leading exponents of today’s renewal of historiography in Europe, his long academic career began with specialisation in Italian urban history during the Renaissance. He is presently Professor of History at the Collège de France, and holder of the Chair in History of the Powers of Western European, 13th to 16th Centuries”. He has edited several books and one of them, France in the World. A New Global History (Penguin, 2019), which presents a history of France focused on contacts and influences with other societies, has been a bestseller. In his own work, he tends to study the medieval roots of such contemporary phenomena as the authoritarian drift of democratic governments, which is the core theme of his book The Power of Images: Sienna, 1338 (Polity Press, 2018). He also writes about fear as a political tool, for example in the book co-authored with Corey Robin El miedo: Historia y usos políticos de una emoción (Clave Intelectual, 2019). In recent years, he has been working extensively on the subjects of historiography and the ethical implications of the historian’s trade, themes he spoke about when he gave his master class on joining the Collège de France and which he has also written about in books like Faire profession d’historien (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010). Besides his academic work, he regularly speaks on France Culture radio and takes part in projects to popularise history, for example, in the documentary series Dates that made history (ARTE, 2018).