WGS is pleased to co-sponsor Professor Laure Murat's visit to the Mahindra Humanities Center's France in the World seminar series.

“Earth-shaking,” “a tsunami,” “a historic moment,” “a world-wide shockwave”… In a few days in October 2018, the Weinstein Affair became the code name for a global scandal that would spare not a single country. Seventeen months later, what did we learn from the event and the “revolution” led by the #MeToo movement? How to address the issues at stake, from sexual harassment to artistic representations, especially in Academia? By comparing two very different cultural traditions (French and American), Laure Murat suggests some lines of thoughts.

Laure Murat (Ph.D., History, EHESS) is the Director of the Center for European and Russian Studies at UCLA, and professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies. She was at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study in 2005-2006 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012-2013. She specializes in cultural studies, history of psychiatry, and queer theory. Her books include La Maison du docteur Blanche (Lattès, 2001, Goncourt Prize for Biography and Critics Circle Prize of the Académie française), Passage de l’Odéon (Fayard, 2003), La Loi du genre (Fayard, 2006), L’Homme qui se prenait pour Napoléon (Gallimard, 2011, Femina Prize for non-fiction), translated into English as The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon. Towards a Political History of Psychiatry (Chicago, 2014), Relire and Flaubert à la Motte-Picquet (Flammarion, 2015), and Ceci n’est pas une ville (Flammarion, 2016). She is a columnist for the French newspaper Libération. Her 2018 book, Une révolution sexuelle? Réflexions sur l’après-Weinstein (Stock) [A Sexual Revolution? Reflexion on the Weinstein Effect] focuses on the cultural differences between France and the United States viewed through the prism of the Weinstein affair.