Geo-historian, research director at CNRS, and director of studies at EHESS, Nicolas Verdier, took up his post as director of the joint research unit (UMR 8504) Géographie-cité on January 1, 2025. Deputy Director of the UMR since October 2023, he was elected in December 2022 to head the laboratory for the next five period (2025-2029). He replaces Éric Denis, who continues his research at the UMR.
Nicolas Verdier holds a PhD in History and Civilization, entitled “Penser le territoire au XIXe siècle, le cas des aménagements de l’Eure et de la Seine-Inférieure”, from 1994 to 1999 at EHESS, under the supervision of Bernard Lepetit, then Jacques Revel. He obtained his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR): “Eléments de Géohistoire” in 2012 at Université Paris VII, under the supervision of Christian Grataloup.
Nicolas Verdier’s work lies at the intersection of history and geography, with a particular interest in the relationships between societies and their territories over time. His research falls within the framework of the intersection of territoriality over time and the epistemology of knowledge about spaces and territories, with the two approaches forming two sides of the same question. How do societies negotiate and renegotiate their relationships with space and territories over time? By mobilizing two fields, the study of spatial recompositions and the epistemology of knowledge on spaces and territories, he proposes reflections on the temporalities of territorial unification and development, on the concepts of scale, hierarchy, network or memory, and even territory. An elected member of the EHESS Scientific Council (2017-2021), and an appointed member of the UMR 8504 Laboratory Council as director of the Epistemology and History of Geography team (EHGO), which he co-directed for 5 years (2018-2023), he has also been a member of Labex DynamiTE since 2011.
He teaches mainly at EHESS, where he has been in charge of a Master’s seminar since 2005. In 2011, he also co-directed a research seminar with Marie-Vic Ozouf-Marignier on the history of interdisciplinary relations between history and geography, followed in 2015 by his own seminar entitled “Géohistoire.” Co-director, with Claudia Damasceno-Fonseca, of the “Territoire migrations développement” doctoral program at EHESS since June 2021, and a member of the pedagogical board of the “Territoire, société, développement” doctoral program (EHESS) since 2007, he was coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus Terra project “European territories (civilization, nation, region, city): identity and development”, jointly run by the Universities of Budapest, Catania, Prague and EHESS (2005-2017). The author of numerous publications and deeply involved in collaborative and interdisciplinary research in history and geography, he has edited or co-edited several collective works and special journal issues, notably on the themes of settlement, spatial processes and territorial dynamics. These include “Le temps long du peuplement – Concepts et mots-clés” (Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2020), the fruit of work by the “Temps long” Temps long’ group of Labex DynamiTE.
He has been a member of several editorial boards, including, since 2017, the Editorial Board of the new collection from the publisher Brill (Leiden/Boston) entitled Brill Research Perspectives in the History of Cartography and the Scientific Board of Cahiers de la Recherche architecturale et urbaine.
