Keynote Speakers

Catherine Courtet

Scientific manager in Social Sciences and Humanities Department, Agence nationale de la recherche. With Paul Rondin, she initiated the «Rencontres Recherche et Création» organized since 2014 by the ANR and the Festival d’Avignon.  She co-directed (with M. Gollac) Risques du travail, la sante négociée (La Découverte, 2012) and with M. Besson, F. Lavocat and A. Viala, Corps en scènes (2015), Mises en intrigues (2016), Violence et Passion (2017), Le Désordre du monde (2018), Le Jeu et la Règle (2019) et Traversée des mondes (2020) and with M. Besson, F. Lavocat and F. Lecercle, La mémoire du futur (2022) chez CNRS Éditions, Paris.            

Emma Weitkamp

Professor of Science Communication and Co-Director of the Science Communication Unit at the University of the West of England. Her research focuses on the participants in science theatre (theatre practitioners, scientists and audiences). Recent books include Science & Theatre (co-authored with Carla Almeida) and Creative Research Communication (co-authored with Clare Wilkinson).

More: Science Communication Unit (SCU) | MSc Science Communication

Liliane Campos

Lecturer in English and Theatre studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, and fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her research explores how art transforms the images and discourse of science. Books include Sciences en scène dans le théâtre britannique contemporain and Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance

More info: Sorbonne Nouvelle and Science and Literature Group.

Steve Abbott

Steve Abbott is a professor of mathematics at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA) with a long term interest in real analysis, logic, and foundations. Bewitched by his experience as a consultant on a production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia over twenty years ago, Professor Abbott devoted himself to researching, watching, and eventually directing plays that engage mathematics. The results of this intellectual journey are recounted in The Proof Stage (Princeton University Press, 2023), which explores how playwrights from Samuel Beckett to Simon McBurney brought the power of abstract mathematics to the human stage.