Senior Demy and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in French Dr Olivier Séguin-Brault has been awarded the Grand Prix de thèse de la Ville de Tours 2025.
Since 2015, the City of Tours has annually awarded a prize to a doctoral candidate whose thesis, defended during the previous academic year, has made an exceptional contribution to the scientific and academic influence of the Touraine capital.
Winning theses are selected for their scientific excellence, innovative character, and strong territorial relevance. For the 2026 edition, the Grand Prix de thèse de la Ville de Tours was awarded to Olivier Séguin-Brault for his outstanding doctoral research, selected from more than sixty theses defended at the University of Tours in 2025 across all disciplines.
His thesis, entitled Rabelais ‘studieux d’architecture’ : savoir architectural et culture encyclopédique dans la chronique pantagruéline, was conducted jointly at the Université du Québec à Rimouski, Canada, and the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Université de Tours, France.
The award, which includes a cash prize, was presented by the Deputy Mayor during a ceremony held in Tours on 30 January 2026. This marks the first time since the prize’s creation that it has been awarded to a scholar from Oxford’s Faculty of Modern Languages.
Dr Séguin-Brault, who joined Magdalen as a Senior Demy in 2025, is currently preparing a monograph based on his thesis as part of a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2025–2027) and supervised by Associate Professor of Early Modern French and Tutorial Fellow in French Professor Raphaële Garrod.