Biography

After having obtained an MA degree in political communication from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Cyrille Thiebaut pursued a PhD in political science. She defended her thesis in 2015, at Paris I.In her dissertation, she studied French (and British as a comparison) public opinion on European defense between 1991 and 2009. Adopting a multi-methodological constructionist approach, she focused on the relations between media and political discourse and people’s opinions, and the influence of the former on the latter. Her research interests include the study of public opinion, especially on foreign issues, the construction of political meaning, and the methodological challenges it raises in terms of measuring media influence.As a Max Weber Fellow, Cyrille will pursue this agenda of research by studying opinions on European construction. She will focus on the rise of Euroscepticism, studying ‘ordinary’ citizens’ perceptions of the EU, more precisely the increasingly negative ones, over the last ten years, in the context of the failure of the Constitutional treaty in 2005, and with the prospect of the forthcoming European elections in May 2019, while Brexit is negotiated.Between 2008 and 2012, she was a teaching assistant and Temporary Lecturer and Research Assistant at the University François Rabelais of Tours. She taught sociology of communication, an introduction to political science, and French political history. She has also worked as a communication consultant in the private sector.