Laure Murat


Laure Murat, born 4 June 1967, in Paris, is a French historian, writer, and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Biography

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, supplements and radio shows.
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 . 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 " and earned her PhD summa cum laude. Her committee was composed of Françoise Gaspard, Dominique Kalifa, Michelle Perrot, Christophe Prochasson, Denise Riley, and Joan Scott.
The same year, she was hired as a professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA. She currently serves as the department's Vice Chair of Graduate Studies.
From 2015 to 2019, she served as director of the .
In 2022, she was named Distinguished Professor.

Research

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du docteur Blanche, an investigation into private psychiatry before the invention of psychoanalysis, based on the unpublished records of an asylum that treated Nerval and Maupassant, among others. In 2011, she published L'homme qui se prenait pour Napoléon, which examines the vast body of archives of the public asylums located in the former French administrative département de la Seine 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 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.
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 as an investigation of rereading, its reasons and its specificities, after conducting a series of interviews with writers in France.
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 #MeToo movement.
In the course of her research, 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. This discovery was followed by several further studies, notably in Proust et ses amis, ''La Nouvelle Revue Française, and the Romanic Review. In the year of Proust's centenary, she contributed to the Cahiers de l'Herne, the exhibition catalog Marcel Proust, un roman parisien at the Carnavalet Museum, and to the exhibition catalog Marcel Proust, la fabrique de l'œuvre 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."

Public engagement

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 . 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 "" column between 2016 and 2019, alongside Sophie Wahnich, Johann Chapoutot and Serge Gruzinski.

Works

  • 1992: Grandes demeures de France, phot. de Roberto Schezen, Arthaud, 422 p.
  • 1992: Palais de la nation, phot. de Georges Fessy, Flammarion, 256 p.
  • 1996: Paris des écrivains,, Paris, Éditions du Chêne, series "Paris", 192 p.
  • 1998: L'expédition d'Égypte : le rêve oriental de Bonaparte, with Nicolas Weill, Éditions Gallimard, series "Découvertes Gallimard" vol. 343, 160 p.
  • 2001: La Maison du docteur Blanche : histoire d’un asile et de ses pensionnaires, de Nerval à Maupassant, Éditions J.-C. Lattès, 424 p.
  • 2003: Passage de l’Odéon : Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier et la vie littéraire à Paris dans l’entre-deux-guerres, éditions Fayard, series "Histoire de la pensée", 368 p.
  • 2005: "Proust, Marcel, 46 ans, rentier" in La Revue littéraire, n° 14,
  • 2006: La loi du genre : une histoire culturelle du troisième sexe, Fayard, series "Histoire de la pensée", 464 p.
  • 2011: L'homme qui se prenait pour Napoléon : pour une histoire politique de la folie, Gallimard, series "Hors Série Connaissance", 382 p.
  • 2015: Relire : enquête sur une passion littéraire, Paris, Éditions Flammarion, series "Essais littéraires", 304 p.
  • 2015: Flaubert à la Motte-Picquet, Flammarion, series "Essais littéraires", 96 p.
  • 2016: Ceci n'est pas une ville, Flammarion, series "Essais littéraires"
  • 2023: Proust: roman familial, Robert Laffont, 250p. ISBN 978-2-221-27130-8 Longlisted for The Goncourt Prize, on 5 September 2023.
;under the pseudonym Iris Castor
  • 2010: Iris Castor et Zrinka Stahuljak, Zoé, la nuit, Paris, Éditions J.-C. Lattès, series "Thrillers", 240 p.