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"Terve! Minä olen ranskalainen musta velho…"

Ok, maybe not, but it is pretty much the coolest sentence I can say in Finnish at the moment. So while I am French, I am not a dark wizard, but the closest thing we might have to it: a conceptual historian! I am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Political representation project, as part of Pasi Ihalainen’s Academy of Finland professorship.

How did I get there? Well, my relationship with Finland dates back to 2017, when I did the in Helsinki. This wonderful experience introduced me both to Finland and conceptual history at large. I  went on to use the latter in my thesis at the Université Paris 8 and Université du Québec à Montréal. I worked on the history of the word "democracy" in Britain in the long 19th century, which I defended back in 2020. My monograph on the subject "At the sound of the new word spoken": Le mot démocratie en Grande-Bretagne, 1770–1920, will be published by the Presses universitaires de Rennes, in a couple of weeks, something I am quite excited for.

This will be my second book to come out, since I had the chance to publish on the use of political lotteries in democracies in Québec back in 2017. While I now have a strong historical perspective in my research, I am actually trained as a political scientist. But after a master thesis in York University (the one in Canada) that focused on social movements and political theory (and led to !), I realized that if I wanted to understand the question of democracy, I would need  to look a  bit  more into the past.  This has been one of my main objectives since then: to develop an understanding of the concept of democracy that is historically rooted, in order to reflect on the necessary transformations of democracy in an age of global warming and oligarchic ruling.

So back to the question at hand: how did I arrive at JYU? A bit of luck and hard work, I guess. While, as mentioned, I was integrating into the Finnish conceptual history circles in 2017, I had not met Pasi Ihalainen that summer. A few months later, I reviewed (favorably) his Springs of Democracy book. Fast forward to 2020, and I am applying for a UK Newton Fellowship to do research at Queen Mary University of London. The process is rather demanding, and I need a letter of recommendation “from an expert on your topic”, but with whom I had no previous contact. I thus got in touch with Pasi, who graciously agreed and told me he was actually working on something that might interest me. He was applying for an Academy of Finland professorship and suggested I join the team. I enthusiastically did, we submitted an application and managed to succeed.

Since October 2022, I have thus been a full time researcher at JYU, working specifically on the question of “liberal democracy” and how it became so darn popular in France and the United-Kingdom in the 20th century (). More generally, I am interested in intellectual history, democratic theory, feminism as well as social movements and I am always happy to have a chat about these topics and more. Outside of the walls of HELA, I am a board game enthusiast, avid concert goer and dilettante climber.