About

Professor Laure Murat's fields of interest include Environmental Humanities, Mediterranean Studies, Digital Media Studies, Food Studies, and Italian Cinema. She is a distinguished professor and serves as the Vice Chair of Undergraduate Studies at UCLA European Languages & Transcultural Studies. Her academic work encompasses a broad range of interdisciplinary topics, contributing to the understanding of cultural and environmental issues through a diverse scholarly lens.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Art
• Political Science
• Humanities
• Epistemology
• Law
• Social psychology
• Psychoanalysis
• History
• Philosophy
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Jessie Hewitt. <i>Institutionalizing Gender: Madness, the Family, and Psychiatric Power in Nineteenth-Century France</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  Institutionalizing Gender, an excellent title although a bit misleading, is a book that has to be read with its subtitle in mind: Madness, the Family, and Psychiatric Power in Nineteenth-Century France. Indeed, the book is not so much about arbitrary internments relying on gender biases, as the title suggests, but about the implementation of gender norms and patriarchy in the realm of psychiatry. This choice of tracking conventional structures of masculinity and femininity in an already very stereotypical world and trying to reinterpret them as well as their “inconsistencies” reveals at the same time the interest of Jessie Hewitt’s work and its limits because it offers an original rereading of sources in a restricted, narrow, and rigid field. Carefully researched and written, Institutionalizing Gender is composed of a total of six chapters that show how gender and class are associated with clinical categories, with bourgeois manliness representing the paragon of rationality and the female considered as biologically predisposed to madness. The originality of this intersectional work is Hewitt’s close examination of how this cultural artifact or “fiction” derails. One of the most interesting examples is the family itself. How did doctors come to praise family values while recommending a patient be separated from home and relatives during treatment? “Re-inventing” the family inside the asylum was the best way for psychiatrists to ascertain their power and present themselves as an ideal surrogate structure.

  PublisherDOI

• « Dire ce que l’on voit, voir ce que l’on voit » (C. Péguy)

  Écrire l histoire · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Humanities
  • Art

  Nous souhaiterions évoquer d’abord le sujet de l’écriture inclusive et de ses implications relatives à la féminisation des termes (noms de professions, etc.). Vous semblez avoir évolué dans l’écriture de vos livres : dans les premiers, les femmes sont ainsi écrivains, auteurs, etc. Si La Loi du genre aborde la question, l’ouvrage se montre très économe en termes d’usages effectifs. L’exception notable, qui pourrait d’ailleurs être interrogée comme telle : « homosexuel·les ». En revanche, dan...

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Des écrivains à la bibliothèque de la Sorbonne. 3 / Hubert Haddad, Line Amselem, Christian Prigent... [et al.] ; présentation par Laurence Bobis et Sylvie Gouttebaron

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2020-01-01

  book-chapter

  International audience

  Publisher

• L’affaire Matzneff : histoire d’une complaisance ?

  2020-01-22

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Veritable secousse dans le monde litteraire et intellectuel, la recente publication du livre de Vanessa Springora, Le Consentement (Grasset) a profondement ebranle les consciences. S’inscrivant dans le prolongement du mouvement #metoo qui a vu se liberer la parole de nombreuses femmes victimes de violences sexuelles, ce recit autobiographique relate l’emprise d’un homme adulte sur une jeune fille de 14 ans, au vu et au su de son entourage familial, mais egalement du monde litteraire : incrimine par ce recit, l’ecrivain Gabriel Matzneff faisait etalage de ces « amours enfantines » dans tous ses livres, notamment dans ses Journaux publies chez Gallimard, et desormais retires de la vente par son editeur.    De quoi ce recit a la fois glacant et impitoyable est-il le symptome et l’element declencheur ? Dans quelle mesure marque-t-il aussi un moment important du debat sur la domination sexuelle ? Quel nouveau regard porte-t-il sur l’enfant face au monde adulte ? Son titre, Le Consentement, interroge les accords tacites dont l’ecrivain a beneficie dans toute la societe, et dont il convient de remonter le fil. Enfin, la question essentielle du consentement limite-t-elle l’elargissement du champ de la liberte sexuelle, revendiquee par la generation mai 68 ? Sociologues, juristes et ecrivains debattront au Centre Georges Pompidou des differentes questions que cette affaire souleve.

  Publisher

• What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine?

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Art
  • History

  This chapter appears from the book, What’s Queer about Europe: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms, Edited by Mireille Rosello, and Sudeep Dasgupta.\n"What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine?" focuses on Ratatouille (2007), the story of Remy, a rat who becomes a chef. This spectacular animated movie could be read as a coming-out story, where the rat embodies the symbolic lonely gay, refined as an object of disgust, excluded and successful. Ratatouille is also a story about race, species and nationality in contemporary France. In this context, Queer studies is an appropriate tool to address a series of questions to this American reading of "old France" and its stereotypical symbols: is the French kitchen a metaphor of the "melting pot" where immigrants elaborate recipes whose basic principle is precisely to "mix" ingredients? Is the motto "anyone can cook” the culinary equivalent of French universalism, assuming that anyone can become French if they simply adopt French culture as their own?

  PublisherDOI

• The Label of Schizophrenia

  Books & ideas · 2019-01-17

  article1st authorCorresponding

  About: Herve Guillemain, Schizophrenes au XXe siecle. Des effets secondaires de l'histoire, Alma editeur

  Publisher

• Flaubert à la Motte-Picquet

  Flammarion eBooks · 2015-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Le temps de la transmission

  Chimères · 2015-02-06 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  que dans les limites des conditions gnrales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas chant, des conditions gnrales de la licence souscrite par votre tablissement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reason in Revolt

  2014-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The last chapter investigates the period of the Paris Commune (March 18 to May 28, 1871) or the Fourth French Revolution, when a socialist government briefly ruled Paris in the wake of the French-Prussian war. After the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848, the Paris Commune encapsulated a century continuously in revolt and represents the summit of psychiatrists' reaction, as some physicians suggested building specific asylums intended for the "Communards" alone. Countering such statements, the archives of the Sainte-Anne hospital, the only lunatic asylum that remained open in the capital during the Commune, offer rare and unprecedented documents debunking a certain imagery of the Commune, with its agitators, "pétroleuses" (female supporters of the Commune), and the devastation caused by alcoholism.

  PublisherDOI

• Revolutionary Terror, or Losing Head and Mind

  2014-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter analyzes the birth of French psychiatry in conjunction with the invention of the guillotine. While psychiatry invents itself as a new discipline, studying how the body relates to the soul and the brain to the mind, revolutionary terror invents the guillotine, the new "machine of government" that separates the head from the trunk. This coincidence between the political and the medical is not only metaphorical. It can also be read in the lunatic asylums' registers that report a great number of delusions about beheadings (and erroneous head replacements). As an illustration of the collusion between history and madness, the chapter traces from 1793 onward the motif of the guillotine and its echoes in medical registers and literature of the time, especially in the works that belong to what has been called "frenetic Romanticism."

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Patrizia Briguglio

  2 shared

• Georges Fessy

  2 shared

• Deke Dusinberre

  2 shared

• Sylvie Gouttebaron

  1 shared

• Pierre Verdrager

  1 shared

• Christian Prigent

  1 shared

• Line Amselem

  1 shared

• Mona Ozouf

  Institut d'Histoire de l'Amérique Française

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Goncourt de la biographie for La Maison du docteur Blanche (…
• Prix de la Critique de l’Académie française for La Maison du…
• Prix Femina de l’essai for L'Homme qui se prenait pour Napol…
• Guggenheim fellowship (2012-2013)
• Prix Médicis Essai (2023)