Chartier, Roger is currently Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) as well as Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Since 1969, he has been lecturing and publishing on the relationship between the material history of institutions and the embodied practices which both animate and survive these institutions: in particular, early modern techniques of reading, disseminating and collecting printed information. The course of Roger Chartier's work indicates the multiple avenues of critical inquiry available to cultural historians; R. Chartier has been in large part responsible for defining what this elusive discipline — "cultural history" — might be. His “On the Edge of the Cliff “ (1997) stages encounters with thinkers as diverse as Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Hayden White, Louis Marin, Philippe Ariès. In the wake of this volume, "French Historical Studies" published a forum entitled "Critical pragmatism, language, and cultural history".