Nantes IAS

Founded in 2009, the IAS -Nantes is a space for interdisciplinary and international research. Rooted in the humanities and social sciences, and open to the arts and environmental sciences, the IAS brings together scholars and creators from across the globe, with a strong focus on voices from the Global South. In 2025, the Institute launched a renewed scientific and institutional strategy, placing collective inquiry, territorial engagement, and translocal dialogue at its core. It now combines long-term fellowships with shorter collective residencies and thematically anchored chairs, developed in partnership with local and international institutions. As a place of hospitality for scholars and a hub of intellectual experimentation, the IAS -Nantes invites researchers to think and inhabit the world otherwise.

Nantes is located in western France, one hour from the Atlantic coast and two hours from Paris by TGV. The IAS-Nantes sits in the heart of the city and on the banks of the Loire River, in a modern building shared with the MSH Ange Guépin. Facilities include fully equipped offices for researchers, seminar and conference rooms, an amphitheatre, and a library. Private apartments (with one or two bedrooms to accommodate families) are located next door. Fellows meet regularly at research seminars and in the Institute’s club—a convivial space with a panoramic terrace overlooking the river. 

Fellows benefit from high-quality services and access to the Julien Gracq Library, housed in the building and offering a vast collection of books and archives and an interlibrary loan service.

Applications from all candidates are welcome, with no restrictions on academic discipline or research themes. Since its creation, the IAS-Nantes has paid particular attention to research proposals by scholars based in the Global South. In the current context of increasing threats to academic freedom, we will also be attentive to the specific situations of candidates. 

The IAS-Nantes is specifically interested in receiving proposals addressing the following thematic fields:

• Academic freedom, epistemic justice, and hospitality
  Projects examining the conditions of intellectual freedom and the obstacles faced by scholars at risk or in exile, with a focus on non-Western and/or minoritized epistemologies.
• Creation, narratives, and speculative knowledge
  Projects engaging with the intersections of artistic creation and scientific inquiry, speculative methodologies, and the ways in which imagination contributes to reshaping knowledge, experience, and possible futures.
• Habitability, commons and interdependencies
  Research into planetary habitability, the shared governance of natural, social, and epistemic resources, with particular attention to the ethics and politics of interdependence, and plural conceptions of justice