Samuel Lézé
Samuel Lézé is a NOTCOM Research Fellow based at the Maison Française d’Oxford in March 2025. He has been an Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Science at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon since 2010. At the Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (IHRIM-UMR5317), he has led the “Dire la Santé Mentale” (DSM) team since 2015, focusing his research on Clinical Judgment Formation (controversies versus consensus). Since 2015, he has co-directed the “XIXth Century ‘French’ Philosophy” Research Program at LabEx COMOD, Lyon University, alongside Delphine Antoine-Mahut.
Samuel's primary research interests encompass the historical epistemology and medical anthropology of psychiatry, particularly concerning the formation of clinical judgment through controversies and consensus. He examines the relationship between psychoanalysis and clinical practices in France from the 20th to the 21st centuries, with a recent focus on the connections between 19th-century French philosophy and alienist doctors. He has co-directed collective volumes on health and emotions (EAC, 2008), moralities (Puf, Routledge, 2013), the history of psychiatric epidemiology (History of Psychiatry, 2024), and the division of science in 19th-century French philosophy (Brill, 2025). Furthermore, he has authored two books on Freudism (Puf, 2010) and anti-Freudism (Puf, 2017), as well as papers addressing the medical anthropology of coercion and the medical reception of the metaphysics of soul faculties in the 19th century.
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