March 2022

AGENDA

Seminars

What controls the trade-cumulus cloud amount ? First lessons from the EUREC4A campaign – organized by Sandrine Bony and Björn Stevens.

Trade-wind cumuli constitute the cloud type with the highest frequency of occurrence on Earth, and it has been shown that their sensitivity to changing environmental conditions will critically influence the magnitude and pace of future global warming. To advance understanding of how the trade-cumulus cloud properties depend on the large-scale environment, an international field campaign, EUREC4A (Elucidating the role of clouds-circulation coupling in climate) will be organized in Jan-Feb 2020 in the winter trades of the North Atlantic near Barbados. Observations of clouds, and of the environment in which they are embedded, will be collected using two research aircraft equipped with advanced instrumentation, several research vessels and ground-based measurements. The purpose of this meeting is to gather some of the key investigators and scientists involved in the EUREC4A project to discuss the first lessons from the field experiment, and to outline the contours of the first publications that will come out of the campaign.

Residential studies

Writing of a book: Medicine and morality at the end of the Middle Ages – Joël Chandelier.

This book aims at showing the role played by doctors and medicine in the constitution of modern ethics and political science, between the end of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1300-1550). By exploring the political metaphors used by doctors, their theoretical reflections on the links between disciplines, their assertions about the role they believe they should play in government, and finally their ethical and political texts, the author hopes to show that then appears a “first naturalization of politics”, which corresponds to the initial stage of what Michel Foucault called “biopower”.

The Invention of the Music Press in France – Anne Piejus.

This work, at the crossroads between musicology and history, studies the appearance of the musical press, a French ‘invention’ at the time of Louis XIV, by showing how the discourse on music (in full emergence of the institutionalization of literary criticism and performances) and the publication of notated music were intimately associated in a unique editorial and cultural project, that of the Mercure galant (1672-1710). This study considers the question of the position of the periodical in the literary and musical editorial landscape, the cultural and social dimension of this “collaborative platform” and the political issues of press discourse – and in particular, the image of the kingdom it helps to give.

Residences

Author’s residency: Isabelle Tillerot

Her project: the plot of the fragment in the 18th century. Breakage and splinters of a trace.

In its contradictory and insolent truth, the fragment is both general and particular, and in everything specific. This project aims to fill the gap in its history in the 18th century. According to the first edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy in 1694, it is the piece of something that has been broken, shattered, and it is hardly said that considerable things. It is, in the figurative sense, the tiny part of a disappeared or unfinished text, which was or never was. Its relevance to the modern period is that it is never self-evident, whatever its appearances and purposes, and always seems to arise and slip away at the crossroads of other intrigues and desires. [find out more]

EXHIBITIONS

EXHIBITION “TREASURES FROM THE FONDATION DES TREILLES”

The Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne is currently hosting Switzerland’s first exhibition featuring a selection of the greatest masterpieces from the Fondation des Treilles. You can go and visit it until the 29th of May. [Learn more]