Meet Marie-Christine Bornes-Varol, specialist in the Judeo-Spanish area (CERMOM, Inalco)

27 October 2023

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Portraits de chercheurs(e)s en études aréales" (PEA) takes a look at the academic career and research and teaching work of researchers and teachers specializing in a given cultural area. Each month, discover a video and podcast interview with one of these specialists.
Sarah Gimenez, à gauche, et Marie-Christine Bornes-Varol, à droite (collection PEA)
Sarah Gimenez, à gauche, et Marie-Christine Bornes-Varol, à droite (collection PEA) © Dimitri Galitzine‎

The "Portraits of Researchers in Area Studies" (PEA) is a series of large-format interviews produced by Inalco as part of the Digital Paris Research School of Area Studies (D-PaRSAS) institutional project and deposited on the MediHal open archive. This series of portraits joins a set of collections on the Language and Cultural Area Studies - LaCAS platform, which aims to build up a living, open-access scientific heritage of research on the world's languages, societies and cultures.

Large portrait


Video: Marie-Christine Bornes-Varol, university professor of Judeo-Spanish language, literature and civilizations (CERMOM, Inalco).
An interview conducted by Sarah Gimenez, young researcher (CERMOM) and engineer for Digital Humanities (Direction de la Recherche, de la Valorisation et des Etudes doctorales), directed by Alexandre Galitzine, produced by Inalco (18/02/2021).

Podcast: Judeo-Spanish language, literature and civilizations. An interview with Marie-Christine Bornes Varol

Marie-Christine Bornes-Varol
Marie-Christine Bornes-Varol (Collection PEA) © Alexandre Galitzine‎

Marie-Christine Bornes Varol, Professor Emeritus of the Universities at Inalco, presents her research and academic career in this interview. She discusses Judeo-Spanish culture, the history of this community and the literature it has produced. A linguist by training, she also describes the particularities of the Judeo-Spanish language.

Attached to the Centre de recherche Moyen-Orient et Méditerranée (CERMOM) she has, among other things, led the ANR research project Aliento (Analyse linguistique, interculturelle d'énoncés sapientiels et transmission Orient/Occident - Occident/Orient). This project, devoted to the exchange of sapiential knowledge in the Middle Ages in the Iberian Peninsula between the 9th and 15th centuries, has been the subject of an exhibition presented by BULAC "Aliento, le souffle de la sagesse" (November 12-December 20, 2019).

Inalco occupies a leading position worldwide in the teaching of this endangered language.