About the lecturer

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Institute for Legal Research, Boalt Law School, University of California at Berkeley, where he is affiliated with the Program in Medical Anthropology, the Global Metropolitan Studies Program, and the Center for Urban Ethnography. He is also Researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne in Paris. Born and raised in Southern France, Wacquant was educated in Montpellier, Paris, and Chicago, where he received his Ph.D in Sociology in 1993. He has been a visiting professor in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and New York City, and invited as a Fellow to the Russell Sage Foundation, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.
Wacquant is the author of over one hundred scholarly articles published in journals of sociology, anthropology, criminology, social theory, social policy, philosophy, and urban and cultural studies, and translated in a dozen languages. Among his books are Body and Soul: Ethnographic Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2000, translated in 6 languages), Los Parias Urbanos (2001, translated in three languages), The Mystery of Ministry: Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics (published in five languages in 2005), Das Janusgesicht des Ghettos und andere Essays (2006), and Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of Neoliberal Penality (forthcoming with Polity Press in 2006). He is co-founder and co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography, and was a regular contributor to Le Monde diplomatique from 1996 to 2004. He is currently working on the sequel, The Passion of the Pugilist, an analysis of the dialectic of desire and domination in which he articulates an argument for "carnal sociology," and a monograph on the construction of the object in urban ethnography. He is also preparing an anti-reader on the works of Pierre Bourdieu entitled Practice and Symbolic Power: The Essential Bourdieu. His next project is a comparative historical sociology of forms and mechanisms of racial domination over four centuries and three continents provisionally entitled Peculiar Institutions.