Visiting Scholars

Laure Bereni is Directrice de recherche at the CNRS (equivalent of tenured full professor) in sociology, and a faculty member of the Centre Maurice Halbwachs - a research center affiliated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris.  Prior to her CNRS position, she was an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at the NYU Institute of French Studies (2009-2011), where she returned to teach as a Visiting Professor in 2017. She teaches graduate seminars at Sciences Po Paris and at the EHESS. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political sociology, the sociology of gender and race, and the sociology of work and organizations.  Her first research work focused on the movement for gender parity in France.  Over the past few years, she has conducted a comparative study of Diversity and Inclusion offices in large multinational companies based in the New York and Paris areas.  Her current project (ProVirCap), for which she has received funding from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, offers an innovative take on “responsible capitalism” by placing the lens on its managers, their work activities and their professional environments, in three business areas: New York, Paris and Madrid.

Gabrielle Escaich is a doctoral candidate in Sociology and a Visiting Scholar at the IFS. She studied social sciences at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Ulm and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en sciences sociales (Paris). All of her work combines a sociological and historical perspective, using quantitative and qualitative methods. Her current research aims at studying vocational and technical secondary schools. She examines in particular the hierarchies and the social boundaries between the school pathways. Her other areas of interest include, among others, History of migrations, Sociology of territorial inequalities and epistemology.

Frederic Salin is a political sociologist. He was a Visiting Scholar at the IFS where he taught courses on immigration and migration policies in contemporary France. He studied social sciences at the Ecole Normale Supérieure d'Ulm (Paris) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). For his graduate thesis, he combined quantitative and qualitative methods to study the access to law in French industrial courts. His current work focuses on the privatization of migration policy in France and on the relations between States, firms and associations. His areas of interest cover migration studies, epistemology of social sciences, ethnography, history and sociology of the State and the nation.