Julie Gravier studies long-term settlement dynamics. Two questions drive her research: why and how do settlement systems persist in the same places for extremely long periods of time? What is the political role of individuals and groups in perpetuating the social functioning and spatial organization of settlement systems? Her aim is to understand the ways in which societies inhabit the world, taking into account very long-term dynamics and the temporal shifts in certain decisions on other processes. To achieve this, she studies a wide range of chronological and cultural cases, mainly on local to macro-regional scales.

After defending a Ph.D. dissertation entitled A city within its systems of cities over two thousand years: the case study of Noyon as an approach proposal at the University of Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, Julie Gravier had completed several postdoctoral fellowships, most recently at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), and obtained the external competition for researchers at CNRS in 2024.