Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn

Biography and/or project

Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn is a Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, Paris. She was trained as a Germanist (PhD 2005 on the history of Sanskrit studies in 19th century Germany, in a transnational perspective) at Ecole normale supérieure, Université de la Sorbonne and Université de Provence; she also graduated in Modern Indology from the Ecole des langues orientales (INALCO, Paris, 2003).

She specializes in the transnational history of Oriental scholarship. Her current project is a monograph on the contours and inner delineations of the 'Orient’ in Western scholarship, based on a study of the successive sessions of the International Congress of Orientalists (1873-1973).

Other fields of interests include:

  • Transnational history of Oriental scholarship
  • History of the human sciences (philology, anthropology, science of Antiquity, science of religions)
  • History of institutions of knowledge
  • Disciplinary boundaries and dividing up of the world
  • History of postcolonial theories
  • History of the uses of the comparative methods in the human sciences
  • German Indologists working for the British Empire
  • French and German roots of Italian Indology
  • Scholarly identities

Distinctions

  • 2000-2001: Lavoisier Grant from the French Foreign Office; Lecturer at Jawaharlal University, New Delhi, India;
  • 2002-2005: PhD scholarship from the Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France;
  • 2006: Prix Pierre Grappin (French national award for the best PhD in German studies);
  • 2013, January: Senior research fellow, Université Yaoundé I, Cameroon;
  • 2017, April: Senior research fellow, Vossius Center for the history of the sciences and the humanities, Amsterdam, Netherlands;
  • 2017, November: Guest professor, Universidad del Rosario, Bogota, Colombia.