Camille Robcis

Camille Robcis is Associate Professor of French and History at Columbia University.  Her first book, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell, 2013), examines how and why, during the 1990s, French legislators turned to some of the most difficult concepts of structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis to reassert the foundational role of the heterosexual family in heated discussions around bioethics, same-sex unions, single-parent households, family names, surrogacy, and adoption.  Her second book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in France traces the history of institutional psychotherapy, a movement born after WWII that advocated a radical restructuring of the asylum in an attempt to rethink and reform psychiatric care.  She is currently working on a project that focuses on the recent protests against the “theory of gender,” especially in their conceptual link to populism.  She received her B.A. in History and Modern Culture & Media from Brown University, her Ph.D. in History from Cornell.