François Hartog

François Hartog (born in 1946) is a French historian. He is noted for his "regimes of historicity" theory as well as his analyses of presentism and the contemporary experience of time. Hartog is also an academic and author of several works including The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History. Hartog was born in 1946. He studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris and was part of a group of Hellenist scholars who studied under Jean-Pierre Vernant. Later, Hartog became an assistant to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck. The two collaborated on several works, which included a project that described how the problems of modern time schema are not limited to an imperialist past or present. Hartog would later challenge what he perceived as Koselleck's Eurocentric reflection of the present and the past. Hartog's works can be classified into two: his early works that focused on the intellectual history of ancient Greece; and, his recent publications, which emphasized the subject of temporality. Hartog is currently a director of research at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) for ancient and modern historiography. He is also one of the 60 historians who founded the Association des Historiens in 1997. Hartog is a member of the Centre Louis Gernet de recherches comparées sur les sociétés anciennes. Hartog explored the relationship of the past, present, and future as understood at moments of crisis in history. Like other thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Reinhart Koselleck, Hartog maintains that there is no difference between past and present since all history is "actually contemporary history". Drawing from a broad range of sources, he published his analysis in the book Regimes of Historicity Presentism and Experiences of Time. For instance, he used texts such as the Odyssey to demonstrate the threshold of historical consciousness.