Hélène Blais
Professor of Contemporary History at the École Normale Supérieure-PSL and a member of the Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine
Hélène Blais is a Professor of Contemporary History at the École Normale Supérieure-PSL and a member of the Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine. Her work is on the relationship between knowledge and colonial empires, as well as on cartography, geography, and travel in the nineteenth century and, in recent years, on the environmental history of colonization.
Her publications include Mirages de la carte. L’invention de l’Algérie coloniale (Fayard, 2014) and Voyages au grand océan. Géographies du Pacifique et colonisation, 1815-1845 (CTHS, 2005), and she has co-edited numerous publications and was co-curator of the exhibition Visages de l’exploration au XIXe siècle. Du mythe à l’histoire, held at the BNF in 2022. Her latest book is L’Empire de la nature. Une histoire des jardins botaniques coloniaux, fin XVIIIe siècle-années 1930 (Champ Vallon, 2023).