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, 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. In France, The Gender of Capital was recently adapted into a graphic novel with Jeanne Puchol (Paris, La Découverte/Delcourt, 2023). A Chinese (Shanghai People’s Publishing House) and Korean (Book 21) 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”. 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“. In March 2022 I was a Visiting Scholar at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
In January-March 2024, I will be a Visiting Professor at the Institute of French Studies at New York University.