Beth Epstein holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from NYU and is Academic Director at NYU Paris. Her research focuses on French urban issues as well as on French and American perspectives on diversity, race, and integration. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in rural and urban France, most recently in 2019 as a Mid-Career Fellow with the Independent Social Research Foundation, when she returned to the ethnically diverse city outside of Paris where she conducted research in the 1990s. Her book Collective Terms: Race, Culture & Community in a State-Planned City in France explores how residents of this city engage with national priorities to define and put into practice their collective life. Her current project explores the impact at the local level of dramatic re-configurations of debates on identity and immigration since the early 2000s, and what that experience can reveal about contemporary polemics about race in France and beyond.
Beth Epstein
Academic Director
Race and social inequality in France and the US, urban studies, the French banlieue, visual anthropology, documentary film, experiential learning.
“Race-Blind: Rethinking a French-American Conversation,” AllegraLab, July 7, 2020. https://allegralaboratory.net/race-blind-rethinking-a-french-american-conversation/
“Les Misérables by Ladj Ly: the broken promises of the French republic”, The Conversation, January 16, 2020. https://theconversation.com/les-miserables-by-ladj-ly-the-broken-promises-of-the-french-republic-129414
“Promise postponed: republican values, social exclusion, and the French banlieue,” special issue on “Dilemmas of Equality: Perspectives from France and the USA,” Beth Epstein, Romi Mukherjee, Janie Pélabey, & Réjane Sénac, eds. International Social Science Journal, Volume 67, no. 223-224, 2017, pp. 63-73.
“Redemptive Politics: Racial Reasoning in Contemporary France,” special issue on “Anxious Politics,” Anouk de Koning & Wayne Modest, eds. Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 50, no. 2, 2016.
“The Moral Public Sphere: Integration and Discrimination in a French New Town” in Transatlantic Parallaxes: Toward Reciprocal Anthropology, Anne Raulin & Susan Rogers, eds. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015.
“Défendre la mixité sociale: Cosmopolitan Hope from Below’’ in Regards croisés sur la banlieue, C. Horvath & J. Carpenter, eds. Peter Lang Publishers, 2015.
Collective Terms: Race, Culture & Community in a State-Planned City in France, NY: Berghahn Books, 2011.
Kofi chez les Français, 16mm documentary film, with Carlyn Saltman, 1993.