Benjamin Landais

Benjamin Landais is a Lecturer in Modern History at Avignon Université. His research focuses on Central and Balkan Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries, emphasizing histories from below through themes like pre-nationalist ethnicity, peasant mobility, rural cartography, and border diplomacy. He currently works on publishing correspondence about Austro-Ottoman border management, organizing a conference on rural land maps, and translating a Romanian historical work about the Banatais migration.

His research bridges history with geography, economics, and anthropology. He advocates for academic independence and critiques precarious research conditions, particularly opposing policies like the LPPR law. Landais values empirical investigation and teaches alongside his research.

Key projects include:

• Editing multi-lingual archival letters (French/German/Italian) about 18th-century border diplomacy
• Organizing an international conference on European rural cartography (May 2020)
• Collaborating on a translated publication about Romanian-speaking communities

His emblematic research object is an 18th-century cartographic 'patch' on a Romanian village cadastral map, illustrating document evolution.