A Foreword from our Director

The Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH) of Clermont-Ferrand is one among twenty-two other facilities within the national network (RnMSH). As part of a Unité d’Appui et de Recherche (UAR – Support and Research Unity), it has a double specificity. It is a full research facility under the administrative supervision of Clermont Auvergne University and the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) – and as such it has the ability to initiate its own projects – and its mission is also to guide its lecturers and researchers by offering them plenty of services to support their research projects (related to digital humanities, geomatics, archeology, audiovisual media, communication, information services, publishing, management, computer science, or even logistics…). For quite some time now, human and social sciences have been a primary field of research, a source of innovative scientific interrogations, able to deal with great society questions. The MSH of Clermont-Ferrand – in which every section part of the INSHS (Institut des sciences humaines et sociales, CNRS) is now involved – enables this field to reach its greatest potential. Its mission is to play a central role in the development of great research themes, in the interdisciplinary shaping of new objects of knowledge as well as in the elaboration of a fertile and continuous dialogue between researchers and citizens. Both of its axes “Territories, environment, adaptation” and “Ruptures, revolutions, innovation” are part of an asserted will to unite and create the collaborations required to implement new structuring projects. The first priorities of the MSH – dedicated to its associate laboratories and open to the world of the so-called “hard” sciences – will, in the years to come, promote academic interdisciplinarity in a continuous way, strengthen the connections with the other local scientific structures, and assert its role and identity within the great national and international networks of research infrastructures.

Sophie Chiari is a Professor of English literature in Clermont Auvergne University, as well as an expert of the Early Modern period, and more particularly of SHAKESPEARE and his contemporaries. Before being hired in 2015 in Clermont-Auvergne University, she was a lecturer in Aix Marseille University. She then took the lead of the English Master’s degree (research and media / cultural mediation) and of the IHRIM (UMR 5317) Clermont team (Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités), where she also co-presented the axis entitled “History of ideas and philosophical systems”.

She wrote about a hundred articles and chapters about the English Renaissance, and 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 more than a dozen collective works (such as Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare, Sophie Chiari et John Mucciolo, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019). She is currently working on themes connected to the notions of environment and nature in Shakespeare’s works. She also translated several English novels. Her last translation of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, should be published this year in paperback.

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