Sophie Wahnich © H. Robert

HISTORIAN

France

Biography

A historian of the French Revolution interested in the relationship between emotions, feelings and politics, Sophie Wahnich is a CNRS head of Research at the Transdisciplinary Institute of Contemporary Anthropology (EHESS). Her method is to articulate areas that are not ususally connected: the history of politics, the analysis of political sovereignty in practice and the role of violence, the anthropology of rituals, revenge, or the sacred. To achieve what she calls a "desecration" of knowledge, she wants to make visible, in the writing of history, a sensitive dimension that postulates shared political values, thus presenting history both as an historical science and as a practice of political conscience.

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