Maria Vlachou Appointed Director of the Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme

The Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme is pleased to announce the appointment of Maria Vlachou as Director of the Éditions de la MSH, effective July 1, 2025.

Maria Vlachou holds a PhD in Greek Archaeology from the EPHE and has worked with the publishing houses of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and the EHESS.

She joined Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) in 2010, where she led the rights licensing department starting in 2013. In 2016, she became head of foreign rights, derivative rights, and audiovisual rights at the HUMENSIS publishing group.

In 2019, she moved to Éditions du Seuil to direct the foreign rights department and to standardize a 70-year archive of licensing agreements. With more than 7,000 rights transactions in the humanities and social sciences to her name, she has also carried out several cross-industry missions. These include chairing the SHS extraduction committee at the CNL and organizing international roundtables on the dissemination of French thought abroad, the practices of private and public publishers, and issues related to translation.

In 2022, she was appointed Acquisitions Editor. That same year, she took over management of the literary estate of Paul Virilio, followed in 2024 by that of Jacques Derrida—both originally published by Éditions Galilée. Conceived as a literary and critical bunker, the Virilio collection was published in 2023 in a single volume entitled La Fin du monde est un concept sans avenir. In 2024, to mark the 20th anniversary of Jacques Derrida’s death, she republished Spectres de Marx. She also published Le manifeste afro-décolonial by Norman Ajari and the international bestseller Moins by Kohei Saito.

As the publishing arm of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme’s scientific mission, the Éditions de la MSH has, since 1970, built a distinctive catalogue in the humanities and social sciences, now comprising over 1,200 titles. It publishes works that critically and transdisciplinarily explore the transformations shaping our contemporary world.

Shaped by the intellectual legacy of major thinkers such as Fernand Braudel, Edgar Morin, and Pierre Bourdieu, the Éditions de la MSH advances the evolution of knowledge by fostering dialogue across disciplines, documenting scientific breakthroughs, and promoting international exchange.

→ Know more