François Déroche

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François Déroche, born October 24, 1952, in Metz, France, is a scholar who specializes in codicology and palaeography, especially Quranic manuscripts. He is a professor at the Collège de France, holding the chair “History of the Quran Text and Transmission.”

After a preparatory class at Lycée Henri-IV, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure beginning in 1973. He earned the agrégation in classical letters in 1976 and the Diplôme d’études approfondies in Egyptology in 1978. In 1979 he joined the Bibliothèque nationale de France as a scientific resident, where he prepared the catalog of Quran manuscripts. In 1983 he became a scientific resident at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul for three years, and stayed two more years thanks to a grant from the Max van Berchem Foundation. During his time in Istanbul he completed his doctoral thesis on the oasis of Dedan/al-’Ulâ, which he defended in 1987.

Back in France in 1988, he taught in secondary schools in the Paris region, then in Auneau and Châteauneuf-en-Thymerais. In 1990 he was elected director of studies at the Section of Historical and Philological Sciences of the École pratique des hautes études.

He has held leadership roles in scholarly societies. He served as vice-president and then president of the Society for the Study of Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Maghreb. He helped organize study days with the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and was elected a correspondent on October 26, 2000, and a full member on January 28, 2011. He has organized academic seminars in Tripoli (2005), Caen (2009) and Aix-Marseille (2014).

Besides these, Déroche is a member of several learned societies, including the Société Asiatique and the Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, and he serves on the Board of Experts of the Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation in London. He is a member of the Board of Directors and the Scientific Council of the École pratique des hautes études.