Laure Murat, born 4 June 1967, in Paris, is a French historian, writer, and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.[1]
Laure Murat is the daughter of the writer and film producer Napoléon Murat and historian Inès d'Albert de Luynes.
In 1986, she began her career as a journalist first at Beaux-Arts Magazine, and then at l'Objet d'art, before spending a year at Profession politique. She subsequently worked as a freelance journalist for several notable reviews (Connaissance des Arts, Muséart, les Aventures de l'art, l'Œil, among others), supplements (Le Monde de la révolution française) and radio shows (Radio Aligre, France-Culture).
In 1997, she was invited by the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts to give a seminar on the "theory of art criticism."
In 2004, she wrote a thesis, "Le Troisième sexe. Du mythe de l’androgyne à l’invention du neutre," for the Diplôme de l'EHESS. She earned the degree with honours, which permitted her to proceed directly to her doctoral dissertation.
In 2006, she defended her dissertation on "L’invention du troisième sexe. Sexes et genres dans l’histoire culturelle (1835–1939)" and earned her PhD summa cum laude.[2] Her committee was composed of Françoise Gaspard, Dominique Kalifa, Michelle Perrot, Christophe Prochasson (advisor), Denise Riley, and Joan Scott.
The same year, she was hired as a professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies (now the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies) at UCLA. She currently serves as the department's Vice Chair of Graduate Studies.[3]
From 2015 to 2019, she served as director of the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies.[2]
In 2022, she was named Distinguished Professor.[2]
Laure Murat's research focuses on three main areas.
Her first area of research is the history of psychiatry in France in the 19th century. In 2001, she published La Maison du docteur Blanche, an investigation into private psychiatry before the invention of psychoanalysis, based on the unpublished records of an asylum that treated Nerval and Maupassant, among others.[4] In 2011, she published L'homme qui se prenait pour Napoléon[5] (translated in English in 2014 as The Man Who Though He Was Napoleon[6]), which examines the vast body of archives of the public asylums located in the former French administrative département de la Seine (including Bicêtre,[7] la Salpêtrière, Charenton,[8] and Sainte-Anne) for the years 1789–1871. Taking Esquirol's suggestion to make a history of France from the registers of asylums as a starting point, she questions the nature of delirium in the 19th century in order to understand the impact of political events (revolutions, regime changes, etc.) on madness. This political history of madness attempts to show the extent to which psychiatry, a science still in its infancy that was at the whims of an often-changing government, interpreted mental illness and rendered it a social phenomenon.[9]
Her second field of research is cultural history, particularly of literature. In 2003, she published Passage de l'Odéon, devoted to Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, inventors of the modern bookstore in the interwar period and publishers of James Joyce's Ulysses. In 2015, she published Relire as an investigation of rereading, its reasons and its specificities, after conducting a series of interviews with writers in France (Annie Ernaux, Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Echenoz, Christine Angot, etc.).
Her third area of research touches on questions of gender and sexuality. In 2006, she published La Loi du genre, a study based on her dissertation research that further explores the concept of the "third sex." In 2018, she published Une révolution sexuelle ? Réflexions sur l'après-Weinstein, which examined the
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In the course of her research, Laure Murat has also written a great many articles on Marcel Proust. While in the police archives in 2005, she discovered a report from the vice squad attesting to the presence of Marcel Proust in a brothel for gay men that was run by Albert Le Cuziat, who served as the inspiration for Jupien in In Search of Lost Time.[10] This discovery was followed by several further studies, notably in Proust et ses amis,[11] La Nouvelle Revue Française,[12] and the Romanic Review.[13] In the year of Proust's centenary (2021–2022), she contributed to the Cahiers de l'Herne,[14] the exhibition catalog Marcel Proust, un roman parisien[15] at the Carnavalet Museum, and to the exhibition catalog Marcel Proust, la fabrique de l'œuvre[16] at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. On 15 November 2022, she participated in an episode of the "L'Heure bleue" podcast dedicated to Proust, which was presented by Laure Adler and titled "La Recherche est un livre de consolation."[17]
Laure Murat regularly intervenes in the public sphere on social issues, especially since the advent of #MeToo and the controversies around cancel culture, about which she wrote a short book in 2022, titled Qui annule quoi?. Her perspective on these issues is informed by her deep knowledge of both French and American cultures, as shown by her articles in Le Monde and Libération, for whom she wrote for the "Historiques" column between 2016 and 2019, alongside Sophie Wahnich, Johann Chapoutot and Serge Gruzinski.
- Prix Goncourt de la biographie 2001
- Prix de la Critique de l'Académie française 2001
– Prix Femina essai 2011