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Asian American Studies Spring Speaker Series, "Against the Grain" presents Camille Robcis, Associate Professor of History and French at Columbia University.

Camille Robcis is an Associate Professor of French and History at Columbia University. She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history. She is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell UP, 2013) and Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago UP, 2021). She is currently working on a project titled The Gender Question: Populism, National Reproduction, and the Crisis of Representation. She has received fellowships from the Penn Humanities Forum, LAPA (Princeton Law and Public Affairs), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

In this lecture, professor Robcis will be discussing Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France.

Find more about her book here!

"Fascism and collaboration with it are not just political choices: they also demand a particular state of mind. In this study of institutional psychotherapy in postwar France, Robcis presents us a gripping and wide-ranging analysis of authoritarianism’s entanglements with histories of colonialism and violence. Configuring institutional psychotherapy as a form of political theory, Robcis deterritorializes psychoanalysis. In the process, she brings together the psychic and the political, the asylum and the colony, and the mother and the motherland."- David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania

Hosted by ASAM and ASAM 202-401 Asian American Literature “Race and Psychoanalysis” seminar. 

David Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at UPenn.