Biography

Guillaume Lancereau is a historian of nineteenth-century Western Europe and Russia with a particular interest in transnational intellectual history. After graduating from Sciences Po Paris and the École Normale Supérieure, he was a visiting scholar at Princeton University, while teaching history at Science Po Toulouse and the Sorbonne.

Guillaume received his PhD on the historiography of the French Revolution from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. The thesis studied the political uses of history in Third-Republic France and analysed the symbolic struggles over competing conceptions of the historian's craft, while putting a spotlight on Russian scholars to reveal the making of cross-border controversies and transnational academic reputations.

At the EUI, Guillaume will conduct a research project on the global history of positivism from Auguste Comte to the interwar years. He intends to shed new light on one of the most widely diffused intellectual movements across the planet, with active branches from Russia and Turkey to Western and Central Europe, India, and the Americas. Acknowledging positivism as a key missing link in the history of modernity, this research will focus on how positivists responded to challenges such as secularization, slavery and colonization, and the place of women and the proletariat in a globalized, industrial world. It will also help to understand how positivist politics, developed under the motto 'Order and Progress,' resonates with contemporary technocratic governance and anti-democratic policies.