Chair of Public Health at the Collège de France - Inaugural Lecture by Professor Didier Fassin
Professor Didier Fassin has been appointed visiting professor of the Public Health Chair by the College of France. His inaugural lecture on life inequalities will take place on Thursday, January 16, 2020, at 6:00 p.m.
The Chair of Public Health was established in 2018 as part of a partnership between the Collège de France and Santé publique France. By inviting a distinguished scholar each year to teach at the Collège de France, the Faculty Council aims to promote research and intellectual debate in this field.
The previous holder of this chair was Arnaud Fontanet in 2018–2019, with the course “Epidemiology, or the Science of Risk Assessment in Public Health.”
This year, Professor Didier Fassin will deliver his lectures at the Collège de France. His courses will begin on April 29, 2020, on the theme “Public Health: A Political and Moral Anthropology.” They will be held weekly, alternating with a seminar featuring key researchers in the field.
The course will be complemented by a symposium on June 2, 2020, on the theme “The Politics of Life: Crises and Critique.”
The inaugural lecture for this series will take place on Thursday, January 16, at 6:00 p.m. Open to the public (subject to availability), this event will also be streamed live on the Collège de France website. The lectures of the chair are open to all (subject to availability) and free of charge, with no prior registration required. With few exceptions, they are streamed on the institution’s website (www.college-de-france.fr).
Biography of Professor Didier Fassin
Didier Fassin holds the James D. Wolfensohn Professorship in Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and serves as director of studies in political and moral anthropology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. A physician, sociologist, and anthropologist, he is qualified to supervise research in public health and the social sciences. He is the co-founder of IRIS, the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Issues (University of Paris 13-EHESS-CNRS-Inserm), of which he was the first director. A Visiting Professor at Princeton University, he has been a visiting professor at numerous universities, including those in Hong Kong, Chengdu, Melbourne, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Cambridge, and Brussels. Recipient of the 2016 Gold Medal from the Society of Anthropology and Geography, he was the first social scientist to receive the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award in 2018. In 2016, he delivered the Tanner Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Adorno Lectures at Goethe University in Frankfurt. A former member of the Scientific Council of Inserm and the Ethics Committees of INRA and the Pasteur Institute, he currently serves on the Scientific Council of the City of Paris. A former vice president of Doctors Without Borders, he currently chairs Comede, the Committee for the Health of Exiles. He has published twenty-six books, translated into seven languages. Co-editor of *The State of Public Health Knowledge* at La Découverte, he is the author of the recent *Humanitarian Reason*. A Moral History of the Present (2010), The Force of Order: An Anthropology of Neighborhood Policing (2011), Judging, Punishing, Supporting: An Essay on the Morality of the State (2013), The Shadow of the World: Une anthropologie de la condition carcérale (2015), Punir. Une passion contemporaine (2017), and La Vie. Mode d’emploi critique (2018), all published by Éditions du Seuil.
Detailed biography and CV: https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/didier-fassin
Learn more: presentation on the Collège de France website
