Alexandre Gefen

Alexandre Gefen is a Director of Research at the CNRS and a historian of ideas and literature, specializing in contemporary culture and literary theory. A pioneer of Digital Humanities in France, he explored early applications of AI for research—such as word vectors and topic modeling—at the Stanford Literary Lab, within the transatlantic project For an Empirical History of Literature.

Since 2017, he has served as Deputy Scientific Director of the CNRS Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, where he leads priorities in Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence. His recent work examines the ethical and political imaginaries of AI in fiction, and he has represented the humanities at major international forums on AI, including the Global Forum on AI for Humanity.