A Foreword from our Director

The Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH) in Clermont-Ferrand is one of twenty-two facilities comprising a national network (RnMSH). As part of a Unité d’Appui et de Recherche (UAR – Support and Research Unit), it has a dual role. It is not only a fully-developed research facility under the administrative aegis of Clermont Auvergne University and the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), and as such can initiate its own projects, but is also the provider of support services for lectures and researchers in their research projects (in terms of digital humanities, geomatics, archeology, audiovisual media, communication, documentation, IT, publishing, management, computer science, logistics, etc.). The human and social sciences have a long-established history of research and innovation, tackling the major social questions. The MSH in Clermont-Ferrand – which now contains representatives of all of the constituent parts of the INSHS (Institut des sciences humaines et sociales, CNRS) - provides the means to achieve the greatest potential possible in this field. Its mission is to play a central role in the development of major research themes, in the pursuit of new knowledge via interdisciplinary collaboration, and to facilitate dialogue between researchers and the general public. Both of its axes “Territories, environment, adaptation” and “Ruptures, revolutions, innovation” form part of the overall design to draw people together and engender interactions to create large-scale, structural projects. The main priorities of the MSH – to help the associated departments and collaborate with the so-called "hard sciences" – consist of continuing to promote interdisciplinarity in the years to come, to reinforce links with other scientific bodies around the Clermont Auvergne University campus, and to assert its role and identity in the major national and international research networks.

Sophie Chiari is Professor of English literature at Clermont Auvergne University, as well as being an expert in the Early Modern period, in particular SHAKESPEARE and his contemporaries. Before coming to Clermont-Auvergne University in 2015, she was a lecturer in Aix Marseille University. On arrival at Clermont, she became director of the Master’s English course (research and media / cultural mediation) and of the IHRIM (UMR 5317) Clermont team (Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités), in which she co-chairs the work on “History of ideas and philosophical systems”.

She has written around a hundred articles and chapters on the English Renaissance, and has published seven individual works (such as Shakespeare’s Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment. The Early Modern ‘Fated Sky’, Edinburgh University Press, 2019) as well as co-authored more than a dozen works (such as Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare, Sophie Chiari and John Mucciolo, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019). She is currently working on themes connected to the environment and nature as figured in Shakespeare’s works. She has also translated several English novels. Her latest translation of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, has just been published in paperback.

On January 1st 2021, Sophie CHIARI was appointed head of the Maison de Sciences de l’Homme in Clermont-Ferrand.