Stéphane Van Damme

Initially trained at the University of Paris I under Daniel Roche and at EHESS under Roger Chartier, Stéphane Van Damme joined the CNRS as a research fellow in 2001 at the Centre Alexandre Koyré. In 2003, he was sent oversea to lead a Franco-British scientific cooperation programme for the CNRS at the Maison française d'Oxford. In 2007, he joined the University of Warwick in the UK as an associate professor, where he took over the direction of the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies with Karen O'Brien. After obtaining his habilitation to supervise research in 2010 at EHESS, he returned to Paris in 2009 to take up a position as professor at SciencesPo. Between 2013 and 2020, he held the Chair of History of Science at the European University Institute in Florence, where he supervised around thirty doctoral students. He was Director of Doctoral Studies in the History Department at the EUI for three years.

In September 2020, he was recruited as a university professor in the History Department of the École Normale Supérieure, where he was responsible for the Master's programme in Transnational History at PSL (2020-2023). Member of the Institut d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, he co-founded the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Studies with Blaise Wilfert in 2022 and was director of the History Department between 2023 and 2025.

The author of a dozen monographs, his research contributes to the renewal of the history of science and knowledge and focuses on modern science and European culture from the 16th to the 19th century, examining the founding fathers (Bacon, Descartes, Linnaeus), scientific disciplines (philosophy, botany, chemistry, archaeology), and scientific institutions and capitals. In 2020, he published two books, Seconde Nature. Rematérialiser les sciences entre Bacon et Tocqueville (Second Nature: Rematerialising Science between Bacon and Tocqueville) and La Prose des savoirs. Pragmatique des mondes intellectuels (The Prose of Knowledge: Pragmatics of Intellectual Worlds), which summarise his approach. More recently, he has taken an interest in the question of the globalisation of modern science in relation to imperial projects. His latest book, published in 2023 and entitled Les Voyageurs du doute (Travellers of Doubt), focused on the critical epistemology of distant knowledge among libertine scholars in the 17th and 18th centuries.

For the past five years, he has been engaged in an environmental history of science, working on a book about the nature of New York in the age of revolutions (1780-1860). In this context, he is a research fellow in an international programme funded by the Canadian CIFAR foundation for a period of five years (2023-2028).