Eva Illouz

Looking at a wide sample of movies and advertising images in women's magazines of the 1930s, advertising and cinematic culture presented commodities as the Vector for emotional experiences and particularly the experience of romance.

Eva Illouz (إيفا اللوز ; אווה אילוז) (born April 30, 1961, in Fes, Morocco) is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris.

She was the first woman president of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.

Eva Illouz was born in Fes, Morocco, and moved to France at the age of ten with her parents.

She received a B.A. in sociology, communication and literature in Paris, an M.A. in literature in Paris, an M.A. in communication from the Hebrew University, and received her PhD in communications and cultural studies at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania in 1991.

Her mentor was Prof. Larry Gross, currently in 2021 the head of the Annenberg School of Communications at USC.

She has served as a visiting professor at Northwestern University, Princeton University, and as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin).

Illouz was one of the founders of the Program for Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University.

She taught at Tel Aviv University until 2000.

In 2006, Illouz joined the Center for the Study of Rationality.

In 2006, she joined Hebrew University's Center for the Study of Rationality.

She has held the Rose Isaac Chair in Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 2008 she was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.

In 2012 she was named first woman president of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in which she stayed until 2015.

In 2022, Illouz was ranked as the eighth most influential woman in Sociology worldwide.

From 2012 until 2015 she was the first woman president of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.

Since 2015, she is Directrice d'Etudes at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

In 2016, Illouz was the Hedi Fritz Niggli Guest Professor at Zürich University.

In 2018, she was a member fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

In 2019, she was the Niklas Luhmann Guest Professor in Bielefeld.

Since 2022 Illouz has been a part-time guest Professor for Theory of Emotions & Modernity at Zeppelin University.

Eva Illouz is fluent in Hebrew, French and English.

She is a regular contributor to Ha'aretz, Le Monde and Die Zeit.

Illouz's research is at the junction of the sociology of emotions, of culture and of capitalism.

In her latest works she has increasingly focused on the impact of capitalism on sexuality and emotions.

One dominant theme in Illouz's research concerns the ways in which capitalism has transformed emotional patterns, in the realms of both consumption and production.

Illouz’ first book, Consuming the Romantic Utopia, addresses the commodification of romance and the romanticization of commodities.

The second process was that of the commodification of romance, the process by which the 19th-century practice of calling on a woman, that is going to her home, was replaced by dating: going out and consuming the increasingly powerful industries of leisure.

Romantic encounters moved from the home to the sphere of consumer leisure with the result that the search for romantic love was made into a Vector for the consumption of leisure goods produced by expanding industries of leisure.

Another dimension of Illouz's work has been to understand the intersection of social class and emotion in two ways.

First, how does class shape emotional practices?

Are there emotional forms which we can associate with social domination?

And second: If emotions are strategic responses to situations – that is, if they help us cope with situations and to shape them – do middle and upper-middle classes have an advantage over the poor and the destitute in the emotional realm?

How do they establish this advantage and what is its nature?

In her book Why Love Hurts she centers on the notion of choice.

The book makes the somewhat counter-intuitive claim that one of the most fruitful ways to understand the transformation of love in modernity is through the category of choice.

Illouz views choice as the defining cultural hallmark of modernity because in the economic and political arenas, choice embodies the two faculties that justify the exercise of freedom, namely rationality and autonomy.

She extends this insight to the emotional realm and studies the various mechanisms through which in modernity choice of a mate have changed and have transformed the emotions active in the will of partners who meet in a market situation.

In this sense, choice is one of the most powerful cultural and institutional vectors helping us understand modern individualism.

Given that choice is intrinsic to modern individuality, how and why people choose – or not – to enter a relationship is crucial to understanding love as an emotion and a relationship.