Stéphane Van Damme

Taking into account the environmental crisis, his current project explores the emergence of a natural history of metropolises from the 17th century to the end of the 19th century when urban ecology started to split the field into different sectors of research (natural sciences and social and urban studies).

In 2014, he published a collection of essays on cultural history of philosophy, A toutes voiles vers la vérité, which explored the role played by the (natural) philosopher in Old Regime European societies. It contrasts philosophe and philosopher in the two different spheres of activity: on the one hand the publicist and man of letters, and on the other the scientist, scholar and natural philosopher.

As editor of the Volume 1 of the Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, published in 2014, and A Global History of Linnean Science (Voltaire Foundation, 2018), he explored master narratives in the history of science and knowledge, both by displacing the historical chronology focussed on the "old regime of science” and by contrasting Early Modern Sciences with the modernist paradigm.

Since 2013, he has been Professor of the History of Science at the Department of History and European Civilization of the European University Institute based in Florence, Italy. In September 2020, he joined the Département d'Histoire at the École normale supérieure in Paris as Professor of Early Modern History while continuing to maintain his position part-time at the European University Institute.

His second avenue of research deals with the urban history of science. After attempting a spatial history of Parisian sciences in Paris, capital philosophique (2005), he analyzed the relationships between modern sciences and metropolis by looking at the birth of urban archaeology as a discipline in Paris and London (in his book Metropoles de papiers, 2012). His recent publications includes a special issue of the journal History of Science, co-edited with William Carruthers on archaeology and material history of science.

Graduated from the university of Panthéon-Sorbonne and the EHESS, agrégé d’histoire, he received his PhD in 2000 under the supervision of Daniel Roche. After entering at the CNRS (Centre Alexandre Koyré) in 2001, he moved to Oxford at the Maison Française to take in charge the programme in history of science. In 2007, he was appointed by the University of Warwick as associate professor in Modern French History and director of its Eighteenth-Century studies center. In 2009, he moved to SciencesPo as associate professor in early modern history and history of science at the Centre d’histoire. He got his habilitation à diriger des recherches in 2010 at the EHESS under the guidance of Roger Chartier and became full professor at SciencesPo in 2011.

Stéphane Van Damme (born 1969) is historian and Professor of Early Modern History at the École normale supérieure in Paris, France.

Van Damme's research examines the relations between early modern scientific knowledge and European culture between 1650 and 1850 by looking at scientific centres (Lyon, Paris, London, Edinburgh, New York), founding fathers of the Scientific Revolution (Descartes), paradigmatic disciplines (philosophy, natural history, antiquarianism, geography), and recently, imperial projects (North America, French Asia).