Union Académique Internationale

Vice-President (2021-2025)

Member of the Board (2017-2021)

Shoichi Sato is a historian specializing in the Western world and, in particular, Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. He graduated in law from Chuo University (Tokyo) and he worked at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of the University of Caen (1969-71) before continuing to study the history of the High Middle Ages of the Europe during a master's and a doctorate at Waseda University (Tokyo). After a year as a resident of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences alias JSPS (1978-79), Shoichi Sato was appointed associate professor at Aïchi University in 1979. He spent two more years in France, in Paris (University of Paris –X, Nanterre with Pierre Riché, École Pratique des Hautes Études with Pierre Toubert) from 1984 to 1986. Appointed Professor at the University of Nagoya in 1987, he obtained in 1995 the title of doctor thanks to a doctoral thesis devoted to accounting documents of Saint-Martin de Tours in the Merovingian period. His thesis was published in 1997, and was honored with the Academy of Japan Prize in 2001. He ended his teaching career with the title of Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University in 2009. Shoichi Sato was elected Fellow of the Academy of Japan in December 2009 and associate member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in February 2019.

Shoichi Sato has been invited abroad by various scientific institutions and prestigious universities. In 1995, he was seconded from Japan to the CNRS (GDR0032), and also invited to the University of Provence in March 2001, to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in April 2001, to the École Pratiques des Hautes Études (4th section ) and at the Collège de France in June 2001. In October 2002, he was invited to Princeton University, to the seminar of Peter Brown.

For his seventieth birthday, in 2015, a volume entitled "Études d’histoire médiévale offertes au Pr. Shoichi Sato. Entre texte et histoire", published by de Boccard in Paris, was dedicated to him. He also had the honor of giving an imperial reading, whose title was "The Cultural Role of Monasteries in Medieval Europe", at the Imperial Palace in January 2016. He received the Japanese decoration "Order of the Sacred Treasure of the Star of gold and silver ”at the imperial palace in November 2018.