Bruno Perreau

Bruno Perreau (PhD, Paris I Sorbonne) is the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Faculty Associate at the Center for European Studies, Harvard.

Perreau taught political science, law, and gender studies at Sciences Po, where he opened with Françoise Gaspard the first undergraduate course on LGBT politics. Perreau has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a Newton fellow in sociology and a Jesus College research associate at the University of Cambridge, and, more recently, a fellow at Stanford Humanities Center. He was also Burkhardt Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, and a visiting scholar in the department of comparative literature at UC Berkeley.

At the intersection of the humanities and the social sciences, Perreau's research investigates how the law is manufactured in contemporary Western societies. How are juridical categories instituted and, once they are, why do they seem so obvious? While the law is often thought of as nothing more than a technique, Perreau explores its social, political, and aesthetic foundations: what conditions have to be in place for a policy to be successful and become law? His work shows that “nature” is one of the main registers undergirding the manufacture of law in contemporary Western societies. Perreau maintains that our relation to community, a relation commonly designated as “culture,” is understood as if it were a “second nature.” Starting with an epistemological line of enquiry, Perreau's research has very concrete repercussions. He asks how have our daily lives been marked by this imaginary construction of nature, whether in terms of our nationality, our relations to family, our social tastes, or our identities? Provided by Wikipedia