AUP Awards Honorary Degrees to Three Interdisciplinary Thinkers and Creators at Commencement 2025

Each year, we are proud to honor individuals whose work profoundly resonates with The American University of Paris’ mission and values. This year’s Commencement Ceremony on May 23, 2025, celebrates artist Julien Creuzet, writer Édouard Louis, and scholar Marina Warner, visionaries who challenge boundaries, provoke our reflection and imagination, and bring light to complex histories and human experiences. Their contributions across art, literature, critical theory and many more fields embody AUP’s commitment to interdisciplinary thinking, diversity of perspective, and the courage to confront the present while imagining a better future.

“It is a privilege to celebrate these bold and original voices,” said Sonya Stephens, AUP President. “Their work reminds us what it means to think freely, act ethically, and create with purpose.”

Julien Creuzet

Julien Creuzet is a Franco-Caribbean artist, born in 1986, who lives and works in Montreuil. He creates multi-faceted works that integrate poetry, music, sculpture, assemblage, film and animation. Evoking emancipatory trans-oceanic exchanges and their multiple temporalities, the artist places his past, present and future heritage at the heart of his production. Disregarding global narratives and cultural reductionism, Creuzet's work often highlights anachronisms and social realities to construct irreducible objects. Like relics of the future brought ashore by an ocean tide, Creuzet's works materialize as amplified testimonies to history, technology, geography and the self.

His works are part of prestigious collections such as Centre Pompidou (FR); CNAP (FR) ; MMK Museum (DE); Fondation Villa Datris (FR); Fondation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette (FR); Fonds d'art Contemporain, Paris (FR); FRAC (Bourgogne, Bretagne, Champagne-Ardenne, Grand Large, Ile-de-France, Méca, Pays de la Loire, (FR); Carré d'Art-Musée d'art contemporain (FR); CAPC de Bordeaux (FR); Kadist Foundation (US). Julien represented France at the 60th Venice Biennale of Art in 2024. He has received the Étants Donnés 2022 prize, the BMW Art Journey Award 2021, the Camden Arts Centre Emerging Artist Prize 2019 at Frieze and was also nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2021.

Édouard Louis

Édouard Louis is a prominent French author and sociologist whose work has garnered international acclaim for its incisive exploration of class, identity, and systemic violence. Emerging from a working-class background in northern France, Louis made a striking literary debut with The End of Eddy, a semi-autobiographical novel that confronts issues of poverty, masculinity, and homophobia. His subsequent works—History of Violence, Who Killed My Father, and others—further interrogate the ways in which personal experience is shaped by broader political and economic structures. His writing, translated into over thirty languages, exemplifies a rare fusion of literary craft and sociopolitical critique.

In addition to his literary achievements, Louis is a significant voice in contemporary intellectual discourse. Drawing on the traditions of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, his work challenges dominant narratives by foregrounding the lived realities of marginalized communities. Through essays, public lectures, and contributions to major publications such as The New York Times and The Guardian, Louis has established himself as both a writer and a thinker committed to examining the mechanisms of power, responsibility, and social change in modern life.

Marina Warner 

Marina Warner is a writer of cultural history, fiction and memoir. She has explored myths and fairy tales in Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994), and Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (2011). Her essays are collected in Signs & Wonders (1994), Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists (2018), and Myths, Magic and Marvels (forthcoming, 2026). She has published five novels, including The Lost Father (1985, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and collections of short stories including Fly Away Home (2014). Inventory of a Life Mislaid (2021 [US title, Esmond & Ilia]) tells the story of her childhood in Egypt.

She has curated shows, including Only Make Believe: Ways of Playing; The Shelter of Stories will open at Compton Verney in October 2025. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2015, she received the Holberg Prize in the Arts and in 2024, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism. She contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and her study Sanctuary: Ways of Dwelling, Ways of Telling will be published in the summer of 2025.