Claude Lepelley


Claude Lepelley was a 20th-21st-century French historian, a specialist of late Antiquity and North Africa during Antiquity. His thesis, Les cités de l'Afrique romaine au Bas-Empire, defended in 1977 under the direction of William Seston, profoundly changed the understanding of the urban world in the third - fourth centuries: far from declining, the cities of Africa had some prosperity at that time.

Career

After his secondary education at the lycée Charlemagne, he was received at the 1957 agrégation of history in 1957 and appointed to the University of Tunis between 1957 and 1959 before doing his military service in Algeria between November 1959 and January 1962. In Algiers, in particular, where he was responsible for school education, participating in the development of a first handbook. Meanwhile, he took a stand against the Organisation armée secrète, wrote and distributed leaflets denouncing the abuses in the place to Le Canard Enchainé which published his testimony.
Back in France, he was assistant at the Faculté des lettres de Paris, maître de conférences at the University of Amiens and the University of Lille III, before becoming a professor after defending his thesis in 1977. He was professor then emeritus professor at Paris West University Nanterre La Défense.
President of the "Institut des études augustiniennes" between 1987 and 2000, he was also responsible for the 'Centre de recherches sur l’Antiquité tardive et le Haut Moyen-Âge'. He actively contributed to the creation of the inaugurated in 1998.
A member of the Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques in 1982, before becoming its secretary in 1992, a member of the Société des Antiquaires de France of which he was president in 2003 and president of the "Société française d’études épigraphiques sur Rome et le monde romain", Claude Lepelley was also publishing director of the series "Nouvelle Clio" from 1992 to 2008.
His research focused on the history of christianity and late Antiquity.

Works