Bruno Perreau

Bruno Perreau (PhD, Paris I Sorbonne; born December 15, 1976) is the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Faculty Associate at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University.

Perreau is founder and director of [https://www.mitfrench.com/ MIT's French+ Initiative], which "gathers scholars working across the humanities and social sciences, whose research and teaching center on the French and francophone cultures and societies." The French+ Initiative joined the “[https://villa-albertine.org/frenchculture/frenchcultures/centers-of-excellence-university-network/ Center of Excellence in French Studies]” network in 2022.

Perreau taught political science, law, and gender studies at Sciences Po, where he opened with Françoise Gaspard the first undergraduate course on LGBT politics in France. He contributed to the university's affirmative action program, and set a new system of academic advising for international students.

Perreau was a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, 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 a Burkhardt fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a visiting scholar in the department of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Intersecting humanities and the social sciences, Perreau's work covers 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 relationship with the community, a relationship commonly designated as “culture,” is understood as if it were a “second nature.” Perreau's research often starts with an epistemological line of inquiry. He asks how our daily lives have been marked by this construct of nature, whether in terms of our nationality, our relations to family, our social tastes, or our identities? Provided by Wikipedia