Centre’s research project: History and Epistemology of English Studies

Conveners: Anne Page and Sophie Vallas

Research blog: https://anglistique.hypotheses.org/

Members: Valérie André (Lecturer), Alice Byrne (Lecturer), Cécile Cottenet (Lecturer), Sara Greaves (Senior Lecturer), Marie-Odile Hédon (Professor), Grégoire Lacaze (Senior Lecturer), Sébastien Lefait (Professor), Anne Page (Professor), Michael Stricof (Lecturer), Sophie Vallas (Professor)

Development in the Social Sciences and Humanities has always been accompanied by research into the history and epistemology of SSH disciplines. In recent years this has intensified with the construction of the European Union and then the rise of digital technology, as evidenced by the International Cooperation in the SSH project, Digital Resources in History of Education and the production of educational data, and several disciplinary initiatives such as SIPROJURIS in law, CollexPersée Ès-Lettres or Mapping the Discipline: History of Education. These approaches, both retrospective and reflexive, have enabled the disciplines concerned to set up data collection programs, to enhance their scientific heritage, to redefine their respective boundaries and to legitimize their methodologies efficiently in order to improve complementarity.Our project, now comprising about a dozen research centres, is based on the observation that culture and language studies, in France as in other European countries, have for the most part refrained from following this trend. Our aim is to objectify historical phenomena by means of the following four missions: (1) Data collection and the creation of searchable databases. (2) Foundation and utilization of three patrimonial archives (researcher archive, institutional archive, interview archive). (3) Composition of a bilingual Encyclopedia of English Studies in France for data analysis. (4) Creation of an open access platform to assemble in one place the databases, encyclopedia and a sound library, which will be developed into a national hub. The project has applied for an ANR (Agence nationale de la Recherche) funding in 2020, in partnership with GRESCO, a sociology research centre based in Limoges, and The Maison Française d’Oxford. It has received financial support from Aix-Marseille School of Arts and Humanities. In 2021, it will hold its first session at the annual conference of the Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur.