Michel Zink

He was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 2000, filling the vacant seat of medievalist Félix Lecoy [fr]. He was named chair of the board of directors of the École normale supérieure in 2004, resigning his seat the following year in protest of Monique Canto-Sperber becoming the head of the institution. He received a Balzan Prize in 2007. In 2017, Zink was elected to seat 37 of the Académie française, filling the vacancy left by the death of historian René Girard.

Zink was born in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris to the poet Georges Zink [fr] and Marthe Cohn. Historian Anne Zink and mathematician Odile Favaron are his sisters. He graduated from the École normale supérieure in 1968, and completed his doctoral thesis, Recherches sur les pastourelles médiévales, in 1970 under the direction of Pierre le Gentil [fr] while working as an assistant professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. Working with Le Gentil, Zink completed a second thesis, La Prédication en langue romane avant 1300 in 1975, and the following year became a full professor at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail. He returned to the Sorbonne in 1987 as a professor, then moved to the Collège de France in 1994, where he became the chair of Literatures of Medieval France. The chair position was created specifically for Zink after having been vacant for twenty years. Zink left the Collège de France in 2016.

Michel Zink (born 5 May 1945) is a French writer, medievalist, philologist, and professor of French literature, particularly that of the Middle Ages. He is the Permanent Secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, a title he has held since 2011, and was elected to the Académie française in 2017. In addition to his academic work, he has also written historical crime novels, one of which continues the story of Arsène Lupin.