Research
The Chair encourages and supports research on beauty in every scientific discipline.
The Research Chair regularly publishes calls for applications for positions including doctoral fellows, post-doctoral fellows and research teams who will align their scientific projects with the Chair’s thematic focus and disseminate the results of their research as widely as possible.
Call for transdisciplinary projects : VITAL BEAUTIES
As part of its second call for collective and transdisciplinary research projects, the Chair will support projects on the theme of Vital Beauties.
It will be providing financial support for 2 or 3 collective research projects currently being developed that focus on the issues of beauty and life.
Vital beauties symposium
July 15 - 21, 2022, Centre Culturel International de Cerisy
Future forms of beauty
As part of its first call for collective and transdisciplinary research projects, the Research Chair on Beauty studies will support and assist, starting February 2021, the two following winning projects for a consecutive 18-month period.
- Adaptative Beauty: Transferring natural elegance to architected materials
Project led by José Bico, ESPCI - PSL, in partnership with the University of Stuttgart (Germany)
- Structural colors
Project led by Ann Veronica Janssens, Beaux-Arts de Paris - PSL & Dr. María Boto Ordóñez, Researcher at KASK / School of Arts Gent (Belgium)
Doctoral studies
Sophie Cohen-Bodénès is the first doctoral candidate through the Research Chair on Beauty studies. She began her doctoral project in October 2019 and defended her thesis in October 2023.
Guilhem Marion is the second doctoral candidate through the Research Chair on Beauty studies. He began his doctoral project in October 2020 and defended his thesis in December 2023.
The cognitive and evolutionary origin of the aesthetic response to beauty, its universality and its variety: an approach rooted in the cognitive sciences and vision sciences.
The cognitive and evolutionary origin of the aesthetic response to beauty, its universality and its variety: an approach rooted in the cognitive sciences and vision sciences.
Doctoral student in the Perceptive Systems Laboratory (LSP, ENS-PSL) From aesthetic perception to the greatest works of art, the subjective experience of Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the sentiment is universal. Harmony, symmetry, order, proportion, equilibrium: these are universal aesthetic principles that contrast with the rich variety of patterns, colors and shapes – organic, human and artificial – in our environment. Drawing on advances in the cognitive sciences and vision sciences, Cohen-Bodénès will attempt to shed new light on the cognitive and evolutionary origin of the aesthetic response, in a bid to understand how the neural networks involved in the aesthetic experience are organized.
Toward cognitive musicology: an inter-individual approach to the perception of beauty.
Dissertation conducted under the supervision of Shihab Shamma, professor on the Perceptive Systems Laboratory (Cognitive Studies department) Listening team at École Normale Supérieure - Paris Sciences & Lettres.
Toward cognitive musicology: an inter-individual approach to the perception of beauty.
Dissertation conducted under the supervision of Shihab Shamma, professor on the Perceptive Systems Laboratory (Cognitive Studies department) Listening team at École Normale Supérieure - Paris Sciences & Lettres.
Doctoral student in the Perceptive Systems Laboratory (LSP, ENS-PSL) The project proposes to study inter-individual differences within the cognitive processes related to the perception of music. This work is based on how melodic expectations are encoded in the brain, that is, the likelihood of each note occurring in a melody. Our studies suggest that this encoding is determined by each individual’s musical history. These melodic expectations are central to the way high-level emotions are processed, particularly the sentiment of beauty. As such, we believe that better understanding how they are learned and how they differ between cultures will help us better understand the subjectivity of musical perception.
Postdoctoral fellowship
The Chair will fund two post-doctoral projects on the following topics.
1. Future Beauty
As society changes in profound ways, beauty in its various forms is changing as well. Advances in technoscience, migration, growing urbanization, evolving traditions, algorithmic beauty, experi-mentations in sound, the aging of the population, the body as a testing ground: all of these phenom-ena are helping to drive those disruptions and are cornerstones for this topic of study.
The research will aim to yield a better understanding of the future of beauty in all its forms, span-ning the full range of disciplines.
2. Beauty and Its Depiction
By questioning our own depictions of beauty, we can understand who we are, why we say what we do and how we live together as a society.
This research project tackles vehicles by which subjective and/or societal representations of beauty are constructed. How and from what is our attitude to beauty created? What historical mindset in-forms depictions of beauty? The research will aim to identify the invariants that shape our represen-tations of beauty.
The recruited researchers will work on one of the two proposed thematic axes.
Rémi Mermet is the first post-doctoral fellow to join the Chair. His post-doctoral project began in January 2020 and ended in September 2021
Upholding the cannon ? For a metamorphosis of the concept of beauty
Research project conducted under the supervision of Isabelle Kalinowski, Head of he laboratory Pays germaniques.
Rémi Mermet, Post-doc fellow at the laboratory Pays Germaniques (UMR 8547, ENS – PSL)
Differentiating the canon? For a redefinition of the concept of beauty.
Differentiating the canon? For a redefinition of the concept of beauty.
post-doctoral fellow in the Germanic Countries laboratory (UMR 8547, ENS-PSL) The question of beauty is as ancient as it is problematic. Linked very early to the idea of art–the very concept of a ‘canon of beauty’ developed in Ancient Greece within the context of sculpture–beauty was not formalized as an independent sphere of thought until the 18th century, when the philosophical discipline of aesthetics was born. Over the past 50 years, however, aesthetics have been widely criticized, said to be a vector of political oppression and cultural exclusion veiled by claims of universality. The established canons must now be reexamined, as evidenced by the eviction of beauty from contemporary creation. Mermet’s project notes this eviction in an attempt to rethink the concept of beauty. In the tradition of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, it will work toward a new definition of beauty that avoids both dogmatic relativism and universalism, in constant dialog with the humanities, the arts, and neuroscience.
The next call for applications will be published in September 2020.
Dissertation Prize
Each year, the Research Chair on Beauty studies issues a call for applications to honor research that offers a unique sci-ence-based approach to topics connected with beauty.
2019 Winners:
First prize
Camille Couvry
Beauté, classe sociale et empowerment: Les jeunes femmes de classes populaires dans les élections de Miss en Normandie [Beauty, social class and empowerment: young working-class women in beauty pageants in Normandy], University of Rouen.
Second prize
Olivier Chiquet
Penser la laideur dans la théorie artistique et la peinture italiennes de la seconde moitié du Cin-quecento [Ugliness in artistic theory and Italian painting in the second half of the 16th century], Sorbonne University.