Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Marielle Macé
2023-2024
Home institution
School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), FR
Country of origin (home institution)
France
Discipline(s)
Literature
Theme(s)
Behavior & Cognition; Environment, Sustainability & Biodiversity; Health
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Marielle Macé (born 1973 in Paimboeuf, France) is a writer and specialist in French literature. She is research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), director of studies at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), and has been a visiting professor and guest lecturer at universities in Chicago, New York, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro. Her research focuses particularly on contemporary forms of life which she considers with poetic sensibility.
Marielle’s books take literature as an ally for understanding different modes of existence. She is currently working on how to connect poetry with an expanded posthuman anthropology. She is the author of, among others, Le Temps de l’essai Histoire d’un genre en France au XXe siècle (Paris, 2006), Façons de lire, manières d’être and Styles (Paris, 2011, 2016), Critique de nos formes de vie (2016), and with the publisher Verdier, Sidérer: Migrants en France (Paris, 2017) and Nos cabanes (Paris, 2019).
Research Project
An Ecology of Speech — Une Écologie de la Parole
As the Visiting Professor in French Literature and Culture at ETH Zürich, Marielle Macé will give an interdisciplinary seminar on the act of breathing (“Respirer aujourd’hui”)—now that a rather suffocating atmosphere is becoming our customary environment (ecologically, politically, socially, etc.), and just after the meaning of breathing has been reinterrogated by a pandemic attacking the respiratory system.
During her fellowship at the Collegium, she will continue her research in literature and linguistics to study the strong articulation between speech and pollution and to understand how the way we talk can make our environments more or less “breathable.”
As part of her fellowship at the Collegium, on December 11, she will publicly discuss new projects with Didier Fassin, professor at the Collège de France and James D. Wolfensohn Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, United States.
Research Interests:
literature; linguistics; environment