Launch of the PSL-L’Oréal Chair on Beauty studies

For researchers, the elusive nature of beauty is a dynamic breeding ground for questioning cultural, civilizational or geographical representations.

What is beauty? How come that one thing is beautiful when another is repulsive, or leaves you unmoved? What scientific and societal phenomena are at work to organize this distinction? Which institutions to preserve beauty, to create it, to reinvent it? What beauty for tomorrow, in an increasingly mixed-world? Based on what formal conditions can beauty be embodied in science? Are there any invariants of beauty, even though the plural nature of its manifestations thwarts any normativity?
 

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A seminar and a series of conferences will be held over a period of four years to explore science and creation, in order to confront every aspects of the complex and fundamental notion of beauty. The Chair is led by a scientific steering committee, a scientific coordinator and a pool of young researchers. Each year, a thesis prize is awarded for research on themes related to beauty.

The Chair is thus a place of research and training, which disseminates the results of its work, from the student to a broader audience, through its seminars, conferences, multimedia works and a final book.

The scientific steering committee of the Chair is composed of Rémi Carminati (physicist), Claudine Cohen (philosopher and sciences historian), François Jouen (neuroscientist), Jacques Leclaire (physicist and biochemist), Alexandra Palt (Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer & Executive Vice-President of the L’Oréal Foundation), Kaouther Adimi (program supervisor for the l’Oreal Foundation, writer), Anne-Marie Turcan-Verkerk (text historian), Frédéric Worms (philosopher). The committee may call on external experts on the requested topics.

The call for applications regarding a first postdoctoral contract will be online in September 2019. The contract itself will start in January 2020.