Researchers
He is a director of studies at the “École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales” (EHESS). From 2005 to 2014, he directed the “Center for European Religious Anthropology”. Since 2015, he has been the deputy director of the “Center for Studies in Social Sciences of Religions” and a special advisor to the Presidency of EHESS for the Campus Condorcet. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Hastec Laboratory of Excellence. After a philosophical education and initial work on Heidegger, with a focus on Schelling (under the direction of Paul Ricœur), he turned towards research on the significance of Christian imagination and imagery in early modern Europe. In 2015, he founded and chairs, alongside José Eduardo Franco, the “International Society of Jesuit Studies”. He was the director of the journal “Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions” from 2009 to 2017 and serves on the editorial boards of the journals “Cristianesimo nella Storia” (Brescia, Italy) and “Revista de Historia” (Santiago, Chile). His work has primarily focused on the history of the first century of the Society of Jesus (1540-1640). His publications cover: the devotional system of the Catholic Church during the period of the Reformation; the spiritual writings and artistic production of the same era, both preceding and following the Council of Trent, to which he has recently dedicated a work; the history of evangelization missions, which he has explored within the activities of a research group founded in 1995 with Bernard Vincent and coordinated until 2022 with Charlotte de Castelnau, Maria-Lucia Copete, Juan Carlos Estenssoro, Aliocha Maldavski, Ines Zupanov, and subsequently by Margherita Trento and Hélène Vu-Thanh.