Nathalie Heinich
Born in Marseille in 1955, Nathalie Heinich is a sociologist, Director of Research Emeritus (exceptional class) at the CNRS, member of the CRAL (Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris), and associate member of the LAHIC (Laboratoire d’anthropologie et d’histoire sur l’institution de la culture: CNRS, Ministère de la Culture, EHESS)..
Trained as a philosopher at the faculty of Aix-en-Provence and then as a sociologist at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), she took a Ph.D in Sociology directed by Pierre Bourdieu in 1981, and received a Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1994. After having conducted a number of surveys in the Sociology of Culture for the French Government and the Centre Georges Pompidou, she has been appointed in 1986 as a researcher in Sociology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and since 1996 as Director of Research Emeritus. Her research mainly focuses on five main issues: the sociology of arts (artistic professions, aesthetic perception, conflicts about contemporary art, the status of authorship), identity crisis, the epistemology of sociology, and values.
Besides many articles published in scientific and cultural reviews, she also published more than thirty books dealing with the status of the artist, the concept of author, contemporary art, the question of identity, the concept of values, and the history of sociology. Her last book to be published was entitled Le Paradigme de l’art contemporain. Structures d’une révolution artistique (Gallimard, 2014).
Selected works:
- Ce que le militantisme fait à la recherche (2021)
- Des valeurs. Une approche sociologique (2017)
- La sociologie de l’art (2001)
- La neutralité impossible ? Le chercheur et ses valeurs, Revue du MAUSS, 2020
