Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis (french: Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis) is a

public university A public university or public college is a university or college that is in state ownership, owned by the state or receives significant government spending, public funds through a national or subnational government, as opposed to a private unive ...

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. ...

, France. Once part of the historic

University of Paris The University of Paris (french: link=no, Université de Paris), Metonymy, metonymically known as the Sorbonne (), was the leading university in Paris, France, active from 1150 to 1970, with the exception between 1793 and 1806 under the French Revo ...

, it is now an autonomous public institution. It is one of the thirteen successors of the world's second oldest academic institution, the University of Paris, and was established shortly before the latter officially ceased to exist on 31 December 1970. It was founded as a direct response to

events of May 1968 Beginning in May 1968, a period of civil unrest occurred throughout France, lasting some seven weeks and punctuated by demonstrations, general strikes, as well as the occupation of universities and factories. At the height of events, which ha ...

. This response was twofold: it was sympathetic to students' demands for more freedom, but also represented the movement of students out of central Paris, especially the Latin Quarter, where the street fighting of 1968 had taken place. UnivP8

History

Founded in 1969, the new experimental institution was named ''Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes'' (CUEV) in

Vincennes Vincennes (, ) is a commune in the Val-de-Marne department in the eastern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the centre of Paris. It is next to but does not include the Château de Vincennes and Bois de Vincennes, which are attach ...

. In 1971, it gained full university status, thus allowing it to award its own degrees, and renamed "Université Paris VIII". Since moving to Saint-Denis in 1980, the university has become a major teaching and research centre for humanities in the

Île-de-France The Île-de-France (, ; literally "Isle of France") is the most populous of the eighteen regions of France. Centred on the capital Paris, it is located in the north-central part of the country and often called the ''Région parisienne'' (; en, Pa ...

region.

Tumultuous years

As soon as it opened, Vincennes became the venue for a continuation of 1968, being occupied almost immediately by student radicals, and being the scene of violent confrontations with the police. One incident, in early 1972, involved a janitors' (travailleurs du nettoyage) strike. The radicalized janitors invaded classrooms, accused the professors of being scabs, and demanded solidarity. Meanwhile, there was so much radical leafleting, some university hallways were clogged with ankle-deep crumpled leaflets. It became particularly notorious for its radical philosophy department, assembled and then headed by

Michel Foucault Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and ho ...

, who in this stage of his career was at his most militant, on one occasion participating in a student occupation and pelting the police outside the building with projectiles. The scandal of this department emerged not around this incident, however, but around one of the philosophy professors, Jacques Lacan's daughter Judith Miller, who was not only a committed

communist Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a ...

, like most of the faculty, but indeed a

Maoist Maoism, officially called Mao Zedong Thought by the Chinese Communist Party, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed to realise a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of Ch ...

as well. The department had its accreditation withdrawn after it was revealed that Miller had handed out course credit to strangers she met on a bus. (Miller was subsequently fired by the French education ministry after saying in a radio interview that the university was a capitalist institution and that she was trying to make it function as badly as possible.)

Recent reforms

Since the turmoil in the late 1960s, the university has endorsed a far more mainstream academic life and has brought in new departments, new professors, and national rules to effect this change. In 1980, the university was relocated to the suburb of Saint-Denis. The university's capacity of 24,000 students per year makes "Paris VIII" an important university with internationally recognized departments in Philosophy,

Political Sciences Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and la ...

, Cinema Arts,

Communication Studies Communication studies or communication science is an academic discipline that deals with processes of human communication and behavior, patterns of communication in interpersonal relationships, social interactions and communication in diffe ...

, and Feminist Studies.

Academics

The university offers over a hundred undergraduate, graduate and diploma courses. It is particularly well known for its political science programme as it is the only public university in France to offer this subject at undergraduate level. The University of Paris VIII also offers some distance-learning opportunities for a select number of subjects such as Law and Psychology.

Affiliations

Paris-VIII is well-connected and has over 250 partnerships with universities around the world. They include the

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

, the

Beijing Film Academy Beijing Film Academy (BFA; ) is a coeducational state-run higher education institution in Beijing, China. The film school is the largest institution specializing in the tertiary education for film and television production in Asia. The academ ...

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original c ...

, the Free University of Berlin, the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Vienna as well as since 2016 the University of Rojava. Students are encouraged to spend one or two semesters at a neighbouring institution in the US, Canada, Latin America, Asia or Europe in order to develop their language skills and cultural understanding. Alternatively, students also have the possibility to teach French in a high school abroad or to complete an internship.

Notable academics

;Philosophy * Gilles Deleuze * François Chatelet *

Alain Badiou Alain Badiou (; ; born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucaul ...

* Etienne Balibar *

Daniel Bensaïd Daniel Bensaïd (25 March 1946 – 12 January 2010) was a philosopher and a leader of the Trotskyist movement in France. He became a leading figure in the student revolt of 1968, while studying at the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Life and ...

Pierre Cassou-Noguès Pierre Cassou-Noguès (born 1971 in Tunis) is a French philosopher and writer. Biography He was admitted at the École Normale Supérieure in 1991. He obtained the agrégation in mathematics in 1995 and wrote his PhD in philosophy under the ...

* Luce Irigaray *

Félix Guattari Pierre-Félix Guattari ( , ; 30 April 1930 – 29 August 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næs ...

* Sylvain Lazarus * Jean-François Lyotard *

Antonio Negri Antonio "Toni" Negri (born 1 August 1933) is an Italian Spinozistic-Marxist sociologist and political philosopher, best known for his co-authorship of '' Empire'' and secondarily for his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a politica ...

* Jacques Rancière *

René Schérer René Schérer (25 November 1922 – 1 February 2023) was a French philosopher and professor emeritus of the universite de Paris VIII. Biography Schérer was born in Tulle on 25 November 1922. He is the younger brother of filmmaker Éric Ro ...

;Psychoanalysis * Bruce Fink (psychoanalyst) * Jacques Lacan * Serge Leclaire * Jacques-Alain Miller * François Regnault * Éric Laurent *

Slavoj Žižek Slavoj Žižek (, ; ; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New ...

;Politics and international relations * Gilbert Achcar *

Josué de Castro Josué de Castro, born Josué Apolônio de Castro (5 September 1908 – 24 September 1973), was a Brazilian physician, expert on nutrition, geographer, writer, public administrator, and activist against world hunger. His book ''Geopolitics of Hun ...

Masri Feki Masri Feki is a French writer, researcher in the Paris 8 University, and a specialist of the geopolitics and the Middle East who lives in Paris. He is Middle East Pact's founding president and author of numerous articles published in newspapers ...

* Jane Freedman ;Economics * Bernard Maris ;Communication sciences * Armand Mattelart ;Hypermedia, new media and cyberculture * Pierre Lévy ;Anthropology * Alain Bertho ;Sociology *

Jon Elster Jon Elster (; born 22 February 1940, Oslo) is a Norwegian philosopher and political theorist who holds the Robert K. Merton professorship of Social Science at Columbia University. He received his PhD in social science from the École Normale Supe ...

* Michael Löwy * Jean-Claude Passeron *

Nicos Poulantzas Nicos Poulantzas ( el, Νίκος Πουλαντζάς ; 21 September 1936 – 3 October 1979) was a Greek-French Marxist political sociologist and philosopher. In the 1970s, Poulantzas was known, along with Louis Althusser, as a leading struc ...

Henri Laborit Henri Laborit (21 November 1914 – 18 May 1995) was a French surgeon, neurobiologist, writer and philosopher. In 1952, Laborit was instrumental in the development of the drug chlorpromazine, published his findings, and convinced three psychiatr ...

( behavioral biology,

systems thinking Systems thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into its parts. It has been used as a way of exploring and developing effective actio ...

) ;Arts * Maurice Benayoun * Christine Brooke-Rose * Christine Buci-Glucksmann * Hélène Cixous * Edmond Couchot * Frank Popper ;Ethnomusicology *

Giovanna Marini Giovanna Marini (born Giovanna Salviucci; 19 January 1937) is an Italian singer-songwriter and researcher of ethnomusicology. Biography She was born in Rome in a family of musicians. In 1959 she obtained her diploma in classical guitar at the C ...

Info archive on musicaitalia.free.fr
( DOC file) ;Linguistics *

Martine Abdallah-Pretceille Martine Abdallah-Pretceille is a French scholar who has contributed to renewing thinking on interculturality since the 1980s. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris VIII and was made Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 2009. Sh ...

* Nicolas Ruwet *

Maurice Gross Maurice Gross (born 21 July 1934 in Sedan, Ardennes department; died 8 December 2001 in Paris) was a French linguistJean-Claude Chevalier,, ''Le Monde'', 12 décembre 2001. and scholar of Romance languages. Beginning in the late 1960s he developed ...

* Jean Dubois *

Richard S. Kayne Richard Stanley Kayne is Professor of Linguistics in the Linguistics Department at New York University. Born in 1944, after receiving an A.B. in mathematics from Columbia College, New York City in 1964, he studied linguistics at the Massachus ...

;University Presidents *

Joseph E. Aoun Joseph Aoun (born March 26, 1953) is a Lebanese-born American linguist and academic administrator, currently serving as the 7th president of Northeastern University in Boston since August 2006. Previously, Aoun was dean of the College of Letters, ...

Notable alumni

;Royalty * Elia, Crown Princess of Albania

References

External links

Official website (english)

Papers and documents related to Paris VIII University
{{DEFAULTSORT:Paris VIII, University University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis Educational institutions established in 1969 1969 establishments in France Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis Universities descended from the University of Paris