Hello!

This is a cautionary tale, with the hope that this post could help future applicants for permanent academic positions in France.

This past month, I’ve had the pleasure of applying for maître de conférences jobs – roughly equivalent to associate professor. It turned out to be a singularly more complicated process than I expected. The actual scientific part of the application was rather easy, as I already had to do it when I applied for a chargé de recherche (“junior scientist”) job at CNRS in December, and my research statements, CV… didn’t change much since then. The administrative part was the kafkaesque part.

My website is now available in French! It is possible to change the language using the menu. A big part of the content is translated, blog posts excepted – they remain in English.

Hi! You may have noticed the new URL and the new design. Now everything (my home page + my blog) is in one place, powered by Hugo and its Academic theme. I was a bit fed up with Jekyll and its long building times, and I wanted something a bit more streamlined. The Academic theme is complete and easy to use; it took me about one hour to setup the new blog, and one hour to migrate the blog posts to the new format (most of which was spent trying to work out the interactions between Mathjax and the Markdown format… I settled on shortcodes, like in this article). Building a whole website from scratch was fun, but time-consuming, and a theme seemed like an okay compromise.

Last week I was at the Max Planck Institute for the Conference for Young researchers in homotopy theory and categorical structures (which was, by the way, a great conference – thanks to the organizers), and I gave yet another talk about the Lambrechts–Stanley model for configuration spaces. So maybe it’s time I write a little bit about it on this blog. I’ll write a first post about the model itself, and later I will explain how the Fulton–MacPherson operad is involved in all this.