Daniel Droixhe was born in Herstal in 1946. He teaches at the University of Liège, where he is an instructor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, and also at the Free University of Brussels, where for 30 years he has occupied the chair for the history of the French language. After earning the “licence” in Romance philology and presenting a thesis entitled “L'arbitraire du signe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles”, he became a Research Fellow for the FNRS. His dissertation, “La linguistique et l'appel de l'histoire (1600-1800).

Rationalisme et révolutions positivistes”, defended in 1974, would later be published as a book, in association with the creation at Paris of a Society for the history and epistemology of the sciences of language. Soon after he became a member of the Study Group for the 18th century at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), directed by Roland Mortier and Hervé Hasquin, and he went to work for the Museum of Walloon Life. Following this he began working at the ULB, where he teaches Walloon dialectology and the history of Romance philology. He became a regular at the seminars of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris) where he has presented, in particular, the results of his work in history and linguistics, at the invitation of Maurice Oleander, and in the history of books, at the invitation of Frédéric Barbier. In 1998 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium. His bibliography runs to 130 items

(http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/ph-search?uid=U005216)

D. Droixhe participated in 2004 in the establishment of the 18th century Study Group at the University of Liège, and on its website he posts bulletins about ongoing work by Liège historians concerning the Enlightenment: www.gedhs.ulg.ac.be. The Group’s research concerns the construction of an intellectual, cultural and scientific heritage in the 18th century by means of the international press. The project involves a systematic indexing of the main periodicals in Liège at that time (1750-1789) http://www.gedhs.ulg.ac.be/recherches/espritdesjournaux/indexedj.html.

The project is being carried on in collaboration with a number of foreign institutions: the LIRE unit (Littérature, Idéologies, Représentations 18e-19e siècles) of the Universities of Lyon 2 (A.-M. Mercier-Faivre) and Grenoble 3; the Research Laboratory on Anglophone Cultures (LARCA) of the University of Paris-Diderot (Frédéric Ogée); the Department of Systems of Reference to Time and Space (SYRTE) at the Paris Observatory (I. Passeron); the Centre for the Study of French Language and Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Lise Andries).

D. Droixhe, a militant Walloon, signed in 2003 the second Walloon manifesto, which favored the joint exercise of all governmental powers possessed by the Wallonia-Brussels Community made up of Wallonia and Brussels. An author and composer, he has produced five blues CDs, including two featuring lyrics in the Liège variant of the Walloon dialect of French – while working with a number of Flemish musicians. His latest album, entitled Gradiveûs (Pretentious) (Douces Mesures 3) appeared in 2008.