I am currently a Professor of sociology at Paris Dauphine University (PSL University) and a senior member at the Institut Universitaire de France. I study the material, economic and legal dimensions of family, in particular through the analysis of inheritance and marital breakdown. My new project is about gender and wealth accumulation in Europe.
My research is at the crossroads of several fields: economic sociology, sociology of law and justice, sociology of gender, class and family.
My last book co-authored with Sibylle Gollac, The Gender of Capital (Harvard University Press, 2023, translated from the French by Juliette Rogers), 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. In 2024, the book received in Stockholm the Ownershift Prize in Honor of Claudia Goldin . In France, The Gender of Capital was adapted into a graphic novel with Jeanne Puchol (Paris, La Découverte/Delcourt, 2023). A Korean translation (Book21) was published in 2024. A Chinese (Shanghai People’s Publishing House) and Greek (Papazisi) translations will be soon available.
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” (to be published in 2025). I am also co-editing a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology with Katie Higgins and Hanna Kuusela about “Families and Wealth” to be published in 2025.
Recently, I co-authored an article with Muriel Mille and Gabrielle Schütz published in Law and Society Review: “Putting the Client to Work: Power Dynamics in the Family Lawyer-Client Relationship” (2024, 58/4). Using a relational, materialist, structural and intersectional theoretical approach, we show that co-production of legal work and its meaning varies greatly depending on the power dynamics between lawyers and clients, — on a spectrum that goes from exploitation to empowerment of the client. It is based on a long-term collective research on family law in mainland France: interviews with attorneys, observations of encounters between lawyers and clients in lawyer offices and in courts, as well as a “3,000 family cases” database. Open access article: here
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 in the History Working Group and co-authored a text “The Institute at Crossroads: Gender, Work and Family in a Scholar’s Paradise“. In March 2022 I was a Visiting Scholar at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. In 2024, I was a Visiting Professor at the Institute of French Studies at New York University (January-March) and at the Universidad Nacional de San Martin in Buenos Aires (August). I am currently a Visiting Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Nov 2024-April 2025).