Valentin Thouzeau

Data science lecturer at CPES, Université PSL, Lycée Louis-le-Grand
Cognitive scientist, Evolution and Social Cognition team, Département d'études cognitives, École normale supérieure

Teaching

I teach data science at CPES, the multidisciplinary undergraduate programme of Université PSL. The courses share a common thread: learning by carrying out complete analyses, from the research question to the communication of results, on cultural and social data.

Statistics and ProgrammingYear 1, semesters 1 and 2 · Data Science, Arts and Cultures
Statistics and ProgrammingYear 2, semesters 3 and 4 · Data Science, Arts and Cultures
Introduction to Data AnalysisYear 2, semesters 3 and 4 · Science for a Sustainable World
Data Science ProjectYear 3, semester 5 · Data Science, Arts and Cultures

Research

I work at the intersection of psychology, evolution and culture, in the Evolution and Social Cognition team of the Département d'études cognitives at École normale supérieure. My current research focuses on fiction: why imaginary stories appeal to us, and what the history of fiction over several centuries reveals about the societies that produce it. This work draws on the full range of quantitative methods, from classical statistics to machine learning and large language models.

Selected publications

Dubourg E., Thouzeau V., Borredon Q., Baumard N. (2025). Quantifying and explaining the rise of fiction. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 7, e20.
Dubourg E., Safa R., Thouzeau V., Baumard N. (2025). Charting the rise of imaginary worlds in history. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, 580.
Zhong Y., Thouzeau V., Baumard N. (2025). Literary fiction indicates early modernization in China prior to Western influence. Sociological Science, 12, 202–231.
Fan Z., Thouzeau V., de Dampierre C., Chevallier C., Baumard N. (2025). Name uniqueness and the rise of individualism in the Western hemisphere (1500–2000). Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology.
Dubourg E., Thouzeau V., Baumard N. (2024). A step-by-step method for cultural annotation by LLMs. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 7, 1365508.
Dubourg E., Thouzeau V., Baumard N. (2024). The psychological origins of science fiction. Poetics, 102, 101862.
Dubourg E., Thouzeau V., de Dampierre C., Mogoutov A., Baumard N. (2023). Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories. Scientific Reports, 13, 8657.
De Courson B., Thouzeau V., Baumard N. (2023). Quantifying the scientific revolution. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 5, e19.
Thouzeau V., Bollée J., Cristia A., Chevallier C. (2023). Decades of Trivers-Willard research on humans: what conclusions can be drawn? Evolution and Human Behavior, 44(4), 324–331.
Thouzeau V., Affholder A., Mennecier P., Verdu P., Austerlitz F. (2023). Inferring linguistic transmission between generations at the scale of individuals. Journal of Language Evolution, 7(2).
Sagart L., Jacques G., Lai Y., Ryder R., Thouzeau V., Greenhill S., List J.-M. (2019). Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan. PNAS, 116(21).
Thouzeau V., Mennecier P., Verdu P., Austerlitz F. (2017). Genetic and linguistic histories in Central Asia inferred using approximate Bayesian computations. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 284, 20170706.
Thouzeau V., Raymond M. (2017). Emergence and maintenance of menopause in humans: a game theory model. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 430, 229–236.

Full list on Google Scholar.

Background

Since 2021: Data science lecturer at CPES, Université PSL (Lycée Louis-le-Grand); research with the Evolution and Social Cognition team, Département d'études cognitives, École normale supérieure.
2019 – 2021: Postdoctoral researcher on the biological evolution of language acquisition, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique and Evolution and Social Cognition team, École normale supérieure.
2017 – 2019: Postdoctoral researcher in computational historical linguistics, CEREMADE (Université Paris-Dauphine) and Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (École normale supérieure).
2014 – 2017: PhD, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle: inferring the history of human populations from genetic and linguistic diversity.
2011 – 2014: Engineering degree at AgroParisTech and MSc in Ecology, Biodiversity and Evolution.

Contact

valentin.thouzeau gmail.com
Google Scholar · Evolution and Social Cognition team