A Professor of sociology at Paris-Dauphine University (PSL University, IRISSO), Céline Bessière studies the material, economic and legal dimensions of family. Her last book, The Gender of Capital. How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality) (in French, La Découverte, 2020; forthcoming in English, under contract at Harvard University Press) co-authored with Sibylle Gollac, explores family wealth arrangements, in particular through the analysis of inheritance and conjugal breakdown. She published a paper in Socio-Economic Review (available ahead of print) on the gender wealth gap in France: she describes how legal professionals and families contribute to the widening, legitimation and concealment of the gender wealth gap.
She is also the author of a book on how Cognac winegrowing family businesses are handed down from one generation to the next (De génération en génération, Paris : Raisons d’Agir 2010) and the co-author of a book drawing on a vast research on family courts in France (Collectif Onze, Au tribunal des couples, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2013).
Her research is at the crossroads of several fields: sociology of law and justice, sociology of gender and family, and economic sociology.
Photo © Juliette Fradin