Camille Robcis

May 27 to June 17, 2022
Camille Robcis is Professor of French and History at Columbia University. She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history. She is especially interested in the intersections of politics and ideas. Her first book, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France was published by Cornell University Press in 2013 and won the 2013 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize. It examines how French policy makers have called upon structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis (specifically, the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan) to reassert the centrality of sexual difference as the foundation for all social and psychic organization. Her second book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021) traces the history of institutional psychotherapy, a movement born in France during the Second World War that called for the profound transformation of the theory and practice of psychiatric care, through the lens of Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She is currently working on a new project, The Gender Question: Populism, National Reproduction, and the Crisis of Representation which focuses on the protests against the so-called “theory of gender” throughout the world, especially in their conceptual links to populism. Her essays have appeared in Modern Intellectual History, Yale French Studies, Social Text, French Historical Studies, Discourse, South Atlantic Quarterly, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Journal of Modern History, among others. She received her B.A. in History and Modern Culture & Media from Brown University, her Ph.D. in History from Cornell, and she taught for ten years in Cornell’s History Department. She has received fellowships from the Penn Humanities Forum, LAPA (Princeton Law and Public Affairs), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Contact : car2129@columbia.edu

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Preeti CHOPRA

June 1 to 30, 2022
Preeti Chopra is professor of architecture, urban history, and visual studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is trained as an architect (CEPT, Ahmedabad, India), landscape architect, urban planner, and architectural historian (University of California, Berkeley, USA) and has conducted research in western and southern India in the colonial and postcolonial contexts. Chopra is the author of A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). She is currently working on a second book tentatively entitled, Communities of Care: The City and its Fragments in Colonial Bombay. Her work has been supported by numerous research grants and fellowships. She is an affiliate fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden, the Netherlands.

Contact : chopra@wisc.edu