I am a Professor of sociology at Paris Dauphine University (PSL University). I study the material, economic and legal dimensions of family, in particular through the analysis of inheritance and marital breakdown. My research is at the crossroads of several fields: sociology of law and justice, sociology of gender and family, and economic sociology.
My last book, The Gender of Capital (Harvard University Press, 2023) co-authored with Sibylle Gollac, demonstrates the existence of a gender wealth gap in formally egalitarian societies and analyzes the social mechanisms that cause it within the family, as revealed in moments of marital breakdown and inheritance. Through these gendered mechanisms, certain social classes monopolize wealth and strive to preserve it when passing it on to the next generation, while other social classes are persistently deprived of wealth.
Maude Pugliese and I are currently curating a special issue of Socio-Economic Review as Guest Editors, on the theme “Gender and Wealth Accumulation: an Intersectional and International Perspective”. Call for papers: here (submission deadline, May, 1st 2023).
I am also the co-author of a book drawing on a vast research on family courts in France (Collectif Onze, Au tribunal des couples, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2013 ; adapted into a graphic novel, by Baptiste Virot Casterman, 2020) and the author of a book on Cognac winegrowing family businesses (De génération en génération, Paris : Raisons d’Agir 2010).
In 2016-2017, I was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. In 2018, I participated to the History Working Group and co-authored a text “The Institute at Crossroads: Gender, Work and Family in a Scholar’s Paradise“