Jan Borm, director of the Malaurie Institute of Arctic Research Monaco-UVSQ will deliver the guest lecture as part of the Fridays brown bag lecture series at the OVSQ/ University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelins on 6 December 2024, 12:30-13:30.
This talk will retrace the exceptional career of the man who went ‘from stone to man’, from the study of scree to the Inuit and other indigenous Arctic peoples and will then present the work of the Malaurie Institute of Arctic Research Monaco-UVSQ (MIARC), officially affiliated with UVSQ’s environment and sustainability studies faculty OVSQ since 2024.
Jean Malaurie (1922-2024) was undoubtedly the best-known French researcher in the field of Arctic studies at international level over the last 70 years. Trained as a geomorphologist and author of The Last Kings of Thule (1955), the most widely distributed book on Greenland in the world, Jean Malaurie undertook 31 missions to the Far North (Greenland, the Canadian Central Arctic, Alaska and Chukotka), which he described in his masterly account Hummocks (1999). Born in 1922 in Mainz, where his father was a history teacher at a time when the Rhineland was occupied by France, Jean Malaurie began his education in Versailles in 1930 before moving to the Lycée Henri IV to prepare for the competitive entrance exam to the École normale supérieure. In 1942, he refused to join the STO (compulsory labour service) imposed by the Nazi occupiers and became a recalcitrant going underground, wanted by the Vichy police.
This talk will retrace the exceptional career of the man who spent ‘his life in the Arctic’. He decided to study geography under Emmanuel de Martonne, who offered him a job as a geographer with the French Polar Expeditions led by Paul-Émile Victor. After two campaigns in Greenland with the EPF in 1948-49, he decided to go alone to Thule, in north-western Greenland, to carry out geomorphological research and cartographic work, an initiatory experience into the life and thinking of the Inuit that he recounts in The Last Kings of Thule.
Founder and director of the famous ‘Terre Humaine’ book series published by Plon, which includes The Last Kings of Thule (1955) and Hummocks (1999), he never ceased to defend the indigenous peoples of the Arctic and the rest of the world. Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études (EHESS) from 1957 and Director of Research at the CNRS from 1979, Jean Malaurie received numerous awards, including the Nersornaat gold medal from the Greenland government and the Royal Geographical Society’s Patron gold medal. He has also been a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the Polar Regions.
