Eva Illouz

Love is a cultural construct, so argues Israeli sociologists Eva Illouz. We love and suffer nowadays just as it was loved and suffered in the pre-modern period. Renowned intellectual and author of the internationally much discussed «Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation» and «Hard Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best Sellers and Society» will speak about love as a product in capitalist society and deliver an analysis of the modern subject’s feelings and sentiments. Illouz calls for a separation of the wish to have children from finding love, and pleads for a form of cohabitation that doesn’t necessarily require love and family to depend on each other.

Eva Illouz (*1961 in Morroco) is a full professor for sociology and anthropology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She studies in Philadelphia and Paris, and has taught in Princeton, Frankfurt and New York, and was a one-year academic fellow at the Wissenskolleg, Berlin. In 2009, she was listed on the Zeit 12 most influential intellectuals worldwide, whose writing will have significant influence on our future.