Laurent Pernot
Professor at the University of Strasbourg and Founder of the Center for the Analysis of Religious Rhetoric in Antiquity - Member of the Institute de France
Laurent Pernot is a French academic and historian specializing in ancient Greek rhetoric. In 2025, he was appointed a Knight of the National Order of the Legion of Honour. He has been a professor at the University of Strasbourg since 1994, where he directed the Institute of Greek Studies and founded the Center for the Analysis of Religious Rhetoric in Antiquity. He has held numerous academic and institutional leadership roles, including President of the Alsace section of the Guillaume Budé Association (1995–1996) and President of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. In addition, he is an honorary member of the International Society for the Study of Biblical and Semitic Rhetoric, the Association for Greek Studies, and the Gutenberg Circle. An international associate of the Italian Institute for Human Sciences and of the National Society of Sciences, Letters, and Arts of Naples, he also serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, including Rhetorica, Atene & Roma, Koinonia, and Ktèma. A corresponding member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres since 2006, he was elected a full member of the Academy on 19 October 2012, succeeding Louis Bazin. A visiting professor at numerous American and European universities, his research focuses on rhetoric—particularly the Second Sophistic—in ancient Greece. He is the author of (among others) La Rhétorique dans l’Antiquité (2000) and Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise (2015).