Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis (french: Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis) is a public university in Paris, France. Once part of the historic University of Paris, 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. 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 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 how ...

, 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 Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, , ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, and pu ...

'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 s ...

, like most of the faculty, but indeed a Maoist 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 Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

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 differen ...

, 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 Beijing Film Academy, Boston University, 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 Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( , ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volu ...

* François Chatelet * Alain Badiou * 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 Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examined the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well know ...

* Félix Guattari * Sylvain Lazarus * Jean-François Lyotard * Antonio Negri * 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) *

* Serge Leclaire * Jacques-Alain Miller *

François Regnault François Regnault (; born 1938) is a French philosopher, playwright and dramaturg. Also a university instructor and teacher, Regnault was maître de conférences at Paris VIII before his retirement. Among his various writings he is the author, wit ...

* 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 Y ...

;Politics and international relations *

Gilbert Achcar Gilbert Achcar ( ar, جلبير الأشقر; 5 November 1951) is a Lebanese socialist academic and writer. He is a Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University ...

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 Jane Freedman (born 21 September 1968 in London) is a British–French sociologist and international relations scholar. She is known for her research on issues relating to gender, violence, conflict and migration, including sexual and gender-bas ...

;Economics *

Bernard Maris Bernard Henri Maris (; 23 September 19467 January 2015), also known as "Oncle Bernard", was a French economist, writer and journalist who was also a shareholder in '' Charlie Hebdo'' magazine. He was murdered on 7 January 2015, during the shoot ...

;Communication sciences *

Armand Mattelart Armand Mattelart (born January 8, 1936) is a Belgian sociologist, known as a leftist French scholar. His work deals with media, culture and communication, specially in their historical and international dimensions. Life, experience, and academi ...

;Hypermedia, new media and cyberculture * Pierre Lévy ;Anthropology *

Alain Bertho Alain Bertho is a French anthropologist, professor at thUniversity of Paris 8 His fields of research are urban anthropology, political anthropology, anthropology of globalization and alter-globalization. Works The globalization of riots In his ...

;Sociology * Jon Elster * Michael Löwy * Jean-Claude Passeron * Nicos Poulantzas * Henri Laborit ( 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