Eva Illouz

Illouz’ research from her dissertation onward has focused on the study of emotions, culture and communication.

Illouz’ first book addresses the commodification of romance and the romanticization of commodities. 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. Commodities of many kinds were presented as enabling the experience of love and romance. 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.

One dimension of Illouz’ 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?

At the center of Why Love Hurts is 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.

In 2008 she was a fellow of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. From 2012 until 2015 she was the first woman president of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. She has been Directrice d'Etudes at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris since 2015. In 2016, Illouz was the Hedi Fritz Niggli Guest Professor at Zürich University. In 2019, she will be the Niklas Luhmann Guest Professor in Bielefeld.

This approach differs from that of economists and psychologists for whom choice is a natural feature of the exercise of rationality, a fixed and invariant property of the mind, as the capacity to rate preferences, to act consistently based on these hierarchized preferences. Yet, choice in general and choice of a mate in particular is no less shaped by culture than are other features of action. This is a theme Illouz has developed especially since becoming a member of the Center for the Study for Rationality at the Hebrew University in 2006.

She taught at Tel Aviv University until 2000. In 2004, she joined Hebrew University's Center for the Study of Rationality, then headed by Israel Aumann. She holds the Rose Isaac Chair in Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Her book Consuming the Romantic Utopia won Honorable Mention for the Best Book Award at the American Sociological Association, 2000 (emotions section). Her book Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery won the Best Book Award, American Sociological Association, 2005 Culture Section. In 2004, Illouz received the Outstanding research award of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the same year, Illouz delivered the Adorno lectures at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. In 2009, the German newspaper Die Zeit chose her as one of the 12 thinkers most likely to "change the thought of tomorrow". In 2013, she received the Annaliese Meier International Award for Excellence in Research from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Her book Why Love Hurts won the best book award of the Alpine Philosophy Society in France. It is also the recipient of the 2014 Sociology of Emotions Outstanding Recent Contribution Award. In 2018, Illouz received the E.M.E.T award [1], the highest scientific distinction in Israel. In July 2018, she was also made Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur [2] in France.

From 1986 until 1991 she studied Communications and Cultural Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she received her PhD. She was mentored by Larry Gross, now the head of the Annenberg School of Communications at USC.

Eva Illouz (Arabic: إيفا اللوز ‎ ; Hebrew: אווה אילוז ‎) (born April 30, 1961 in Fes, Morocco) is a professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University in 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.

Illouz argues that psychology has been central to the constitution of modern identity and to modern emotional life: from the 1920s to the 1960s clinical psychologists became an extraordinarily dominant social group as they entered the army, the corporation, the school, the state, social services, the media, child rearing, sexuality, marriage, church pastoral care. In all of these realms, psychology established itself as the ultimate authority in matters of human distress by offering techniques to transform and overcome that distress. Psychologists of all persuasions have provided the main narrative of self-development for the 20th century. The psychological persuasion has transformed what was classified as a moral problem into a disease and may thus be understood as part and parcel of the broader phenomenon of the medicalization of social life. What is common to theme 1 and theme 2 is that both love and psychological health constitute utopias of happiness for the modern self, that both are mediated through consumption and that both constitute horizons to which the modern self aspires. In that sense, one overarching theme of her work can be called the utopia of happiness and its interaction with the utopia of consumption.