Summer in the City

A Summer Selection

Essays

■Alice Bonzom, "A Crash-Course in Femininity. Female Criminals in the Victorian and Edwardian Era"
While ideal Victorian women were supposed to be “angels in the house”, female criminals were seen as “demons in the jailhouse”. As such, they were a disruptive force and had to be dealt with. Deconstructing and reconstructing these deviants to make them more “womanly” became a major issue in the late 19^th century.
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■Élodie Bertrand, "Ronald Coase: A Century of Economics"
Ronald Coase (1910-2013), the 1991 Nobel Laureate in Economics, is famous for his oft-quoted and just as often misunderstood “theorem.” His seminal works on transaction costs, property rights, and regulation continue to stimulate a rich reflection in economics and beyond.
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■Juliette Galonnier, "The Islam of Converts"
The religious convert is a figure of fear and fascination today. Looking beyond clichés, Juliette Galonnier’s investigation in France and the United States shows the daily struggles facing converts who, in the absence of established social frameworks, often experience their religion in great solitude – while at the same time trying to reinvent it.
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■Salvatore D’Onofrio, "Françoise Héritier’s Activist Structuralism"
By asserting that structuralism is a fruitful approach to kinship relations or the difference between the sexes, Françoise Héritier radically renewed anthropological methodology. Her life’s work has also shown us that scientific commitment goes hand-in-hand with societal involvement.
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■Pierre Pénet, "Rethinking Odious Debt
The doctrine of ‘odious debt’ has often been invoked to call for the cancellation of debts in very specific and complex political contexts. In this stimulating essay, Pierre Pénet endeavours to reconsider its application in today’s society in a more flexible and comprehensive way.
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Interviews

■Ivan Jablonka, "The reception of refugees. An Interview with Aline Angoustures and Dzovinar Kevonian"
At a time when the refugee issue is highly topical, a collection of essays offers a history of asylum administration and its actors and practices. A first step towards a European history of asylum in the twentieth century.
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■Ophélie Siméon, "From Marx to Marxism: Histories of an Idea. An Interview with Gregory Claeys"
Two hundred years after Karl Marx’s birth, Gregory Claeys takes a new look at the thinker’s intellectual formation, wide-ranging posterity and continued relevance in the 21^st century.
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