Barbara Cassin, who holds a doctorate in literature, is a recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal, a member of the Académie française, and a philologist and philosopher. A student of Michel Deguy, she participated in the 1969 Le Thor seminar with Martin Heidegger at René Char’s home, conducted her research under the supervision of Pierre Aubenque, and relearned Greek with Jean Bollack and Heinz Wismann. She has taught in Brazil, Ukraine, and South Africa, among other places.
A specialist in ancient Greece, Homer and Parmenides, the Sophists, and Aristotle, she explores the power of words. Approaching translation as a craft that engages with differences, she collaborated with a team to create the European Vocabulary of Philosophies and the Dictionary of the Untranslatable (Seuil-Robert, 2004, 2019), a work that has in turn been adapted into about ten languages.
As an exhibition curator (including After Babel: Translation , Mucem, 2016–2017), she helped design the permanent exhibition at the Cité Internationale de la Langue Française in Villers-Cotterêts.
An honorary citizen of the city of São Paulo, she holds honorary doctorates from the University of Bucharest and the Mohyla Academy in Kyiv. recipient of the Grand Prix de Philosophie from the Académie Française in 2012 and the French Voices Award in 2015 for La Nostalgie, she is a Knight of the Legion of Honor, a Commander of the National Order of Merit, a Commander of Arts and Letters, and a Grand Commander of the Order of Honor (Greece).