Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires et transculturelles

The Centre for Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Research (C.R.I.T. – EA 3224) is primarily composed of researchers working in the field of foreign language studies (English, German and Spanish). Their areas of specialization cover three distinct domains: history and civilization, literature, and linguistics. Other members of the C.R.I.T. carry out research in Natural Language Processing (NLP), in linguistics and in French and comparative literature. Instead of following the customary divisions between research areas, the team gives priority to an interdisciplinary and transcultural approach to its objects of study, irrespective of their epoch, language or cultural specificity. The coherence of the research group is based on the convergence of perspectives (historical, linguistic, literary, aesthetic, or epistemological) focused on the cultural field. The cultural field is thus understood as the sum of collective representations specific to a given society, which may be studied through its language and cultural practices, but also through its sentiments, values, symbolic markers, and its collective knowledge and imagination. These objects are studied mainly in their dynamic dimension, which is to say, in terms of the phenomena of circulation, transfer, and exchange that constitute and traverse them. The C.R.I.T is organized around three main directions of research: 1) the examination of interactions between science and textuality, either through an analysis of the rhetoric of scientific discourse, or by focusing on the exchanges between science and literary discourse 2) the study of gendered identities in their relation to social and cultural fields 3) the analysis of the points of contact between languages and cultures through the phenomena of migration, cultural exchanges, and multilingualism