Jean Terrier studied social and political science at the Universities of Lausanne (B.A.) and Cambridge (MPhil), and at the European University Institute in Florence (PhD). Before his time at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at Columbia University in New York and at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. In his work, he combines perspectives from social and political theory, the history of concepts, and the history of the social sciences. He is especially interested in the representation of identity and difference among social and political thinkers, working for instance on the history of the concept of culture, on the problem of political traditions, on the metaphor of the "body politic", on the national imaginary.