Prizes and awards

Madame Carine Barbafieri, University Professor of 17th-century French literature, has been awarded a senior chair by the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF).

After a cycle of research on French tragedy and gallantry, another on the critical category of "bad taste", Carine Barbafieri is currently working on inconvenient laughter, aggressive laughter or laughter that hurts modesty, as well as on the reception of 17th-century French theater abroad.

"Géloscopie féminine. Laughter at the time of the emergence of discourses on modesty (late sixteenth-eighteenth century)".

The project aims to examine the sexual fascination that women's laughter begins to arouse from the emergence of discourses on modesty, both from a linguistic and literary, societal and medical point of view. It is in fact in the modern period (late 16th-18th centuries) that women's laughter takes on a frankly sexual connotation, while never ceasing to be praised in the context of social relations, as long as it is moderate. The project has three axes: (1) identify pattern of veiled sexual jokes and study how women respond; (2) draw up a typology of bad laughter and study places of resistance to the normalization of laughter; (3) draw up a cross-history of the mouth and the female sex, starting with the discovery of the clitoris in the mid-sixteenth century, the papillary structure of the tongue and Sténon's canal in the mid-seventeenth century.

In Landau, Lars Thorben Henk received the university prize for the best doctoral thesis for his cotutelle thesis. He was supervised in Landau by Prof. Dr. Schuhen and in Valenciennes by Prof. Dr. Schwerter. We congratulate him on this distinction and look forward to working with him.

Ahlam BERNAOUI, a PhD student at LARSH - DeScripto department, recently took part in the "DeepFake Challenge" event organized by the Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique (UM6P) in Morocco. Her project Yaqeen won the first prize.

Yaqeen is an artificial intelligence-based decision support platform designed to detect misinformation through linguistic, emotional and contextual cross-analysis. This project is part of the valorization of her research work on the rhetoric of emotions in media discourse, carried out as part of her cotutelle thesis between Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France and Université Hassan II de Casablanca.
This thesis is directed by Monsieur Arnaud Huftier on the French side, and by Messieurs Hassan Habibi and Mouhcine Saidi Amraoui on the Moroccan side.

Yaqeen was co-founded by her and her husband. He is a doctor in artificial intelligence at LAMIH, and their collaboration enables them to combine their expertise in human sciences and advanced technologies to address major societal challenges such as the fight against disinformation.

Soilio Coulibaly, a PhD student at LARSH, received the award for best poster in the "Humanities and Social Sciences" category at the 2025 edition of the Researchers' Tuesday held on April 01, 2025, at IMTD in Valenciennes.

Emanuele Arioli, teacher-researcher at LARSH, winner of an Excellence grant from the European Research Council

His dossier on the theme of Charlemagne's legends (Carolus Magnus's Oral Legends: Unravelling and Safeguarding) was selected from 1,039 dossiers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It is one of ten grants in the "Study of cultures and the arts"

https://www.uphf.fr/larsh/actualites/emanuele-arioli-laureat-dune-bours…

Jérémy Elmerich, a doctoral student at LARSH, saw his thesis awarded the Prix du livre politique de l'Assemblée Nationale du Québec, in the "best doctoral thesis" category, in May 2024.

https://www.assnat.qc.ca/fr/actualites-salle-presse/communiques/Communi…

Soilio Coulibaly, aka Soilioba, artist from Valenciennes and doctoral student at LARSH received the First Prize and the Prize in the Languages, Literature, Urban Planning, Digital Arts and Arts category at Researchers' Tuesday for his work on voluptuous "Appoutchou" women. Impressions.
https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/1454368/article/2024-04-21/peinture-les-appoutchou-du-valenciennois-soilioba-prime-au-mardi-des-chercheurs

Ahlam, a bright and dynamic PhD student from the LARSH, DeScripto Department, won the best poster award, Social Sciences / Humanities And Humanities category, at the "Mardi des Chercheurs" event in June 2023

Caroline SOREAU, doctoral student in research-creation in the DeScripto Department, received the best poster award in the LUNA category (Language, Literature, Urbanism, Digital Arts and Arts), at the 11th edition of the Researchers' Tuesday this September 06, 2022 at UMONS.

Sylvain PETIT, HDR Senior Lecturer in Tourism Economics, along with his Asia-Pacific team, was awarded the gold medal in the International Tourism Forecasting competition at the IATE (International Association for Tourism Economics)

Blandine Pérona, Senior Lecturer in French Language and Literature, is a laureate of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). She is developing work on d'Erasme and his French reception, on rhetoric, hermeneutics and freedom among Renaissance humanists, and on humanist declamation.

Laëtitia Deudon, a doctoral student in history, is a winner of the 2021 Concours de conservateur du patrimoine, specializing in Archaeology/State. Laëtitia is finalizing her thesis "Etude comparée de la valllée de l'Escaut du Cambrésis à Tournai (XII-Xxe siècles) et de la vallée du Saint-Laurent dans la région de Montréal (XVII-Xxe siècles)", supervised by Professor Corinne Beck.

Virginie Blondeau, PhD in Information and Communication Sciences, is the winner of a prize to support academic research by the Université Populaire Mineurs du Monde - Gauheria. Her work focuses on the conditions that, from the visitor's point of view, transform a living witness into a Great Digital Witness, particularly in the context of the memory of the Nord - Pas-de-Calais mining basin.