Sophie Body-Gendrot
René Lévy
We mourn our dear friend and colleague Sophie Body-Gendrot who died on Friday 21 September 2018. A Professor emeritus at the Sorbonne University (formerly Sorbonne-Paris IV) in the Department of Anglophone studies and researcher at the Centre de recherche sociologique sur le droit et les institutions pénales (CESDIP). Sophie was a Knight in the order of Palmes académiques (a national distinction for academics) and of the order of Legion d’Honneur (the highest French distinction).
Trained in Anglo-American studies at the Sorbonne, Sophie held a doctorate in political science from the Institut d’études politiques of Paris (1984) and was one of the leading Americanists in the country. Over the course of her career she benefited from numerous foreign prestigious fellowships and guest professorships, especially in the United States. She had been a member of the board of the Milton Eisenhower Foundation (1998–2008) and of the Advisory Council of the French American Foundation, Vice-President of the Association Française d’Études Américaines (1990–1997), and President of the European Society of Criminology (2009–2011).
Sophie was a specialist in American studies but more specifically in urban studies. Over the years, her interest in public order and security issues grew steadily and that was her reason for joining the main French criminology and criminal justice research centre, the Centre de recherche sociologique sur le droit et les institutions pénales in 1995 (full disclosure: I was the Centre’s director at the time) . She authored, co-authored or co-edited more than twenty volumes in French and English, and numerous chapters and academic articles. Her main edited books include La ville et l’urbain. L’état des savoirs (with T. Paquot and M. Lussault, La découverte, 2000), a Handbook of Urban Studies, Violence in Europe. Historical and contemporary perspectives (with P. Spierenburg, Springer, 2008) and The Routledge handbook of European criminology (with M. Hough, K. Kereszi, R. Lévy and S. Snacken, Rouledge, 2014).
Her first major book was Ville et violence (Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), followed by The social control of cities? A comparative perspective (Blackwell, 2000). Both books explore the relation- ships of social inequalities (including ethnicity), urban violence and crime in the context of globalisation, an issue she would pursue until her last book, Public disorder and globalization (Routledge, 2017). She also was among the first to confront the issue of police racism in France (Police et discriminations raciales, le tabou français, with C. Wihtol de Wenden, Ed. de l’Atelier, 2003), and was appointed to the French Advisory Commission overseeing police misconduct (2007–2011).
Because of Sophie Body-Gendrot’s persistence in coming back to the issue of how cities deal with social and public order issues, her books and articles can be read as a chronicle of how academic and official thinking has evolved across the last quarter century on these issues in different countries.
Sophie Body-Gendrot’s trademark, so to speak, was the comparative perspective. A majority of her books are based on empirically grounded analysis of American, British and French situations, with occasional forays to India, South Africa or Brazil (as in her Globalization, Fear and Insecurity. The challenges for cities North and South, Routledge, 2012). In effect, Sophie Body-Gendrot was a go-between passing on French research results to an Anglophone audience and vice-versa. She always stressed the importance of context, for example never missing an opportunity to explain to her French colleagues that one could not speak of the US in general, as some were prone to, but that it was a highly diverse country. Reciprocally, she would also explain to an Anglo-Saxon audience the peculiarities of French views regarding secularism or discrimination (as in Policing the inner city in France, Britain and the US, with C. Wihtol de Wenden, Routledge, 2014).
Sophie Body-Gendrot was a tireless scholar and professor, but her numerous friends on the two shores of the Atlantic and elsewhere will remember her as a charming and generous person who faced her fatal illness with extraordinary courage, dignity and even humour. To her husband Alain, and her daughters Loraine and Elodie we express our deepest condolences.
René Lévy is Directeur de recherche au CNRS, CESDIP, Guyancourt
Enzo Mingione
Sophie Body-Gendrot has been a beloved friend and a clever and widely-learned intellectual. It has been a great pleasure working with her, exchanging opinions and experiences, discussing the crucial elements contemporary social and political change. Her personality and intelligence never failed to light up seminars and conferences as well as social gatherings. To her young colleagues and students, she gave encouragement to pursue knowledge and curiosity for social life. To her peers, she gave intellectual stimulus and a great capacity for collaboration in order to understand and explain social change.
She raised critical urban questions and her contribution to the knowledge of cities has been extremely important. Her work straddled sociology, criminology and political science. She wrote extensively about issues of security, urban violence and the discrimination suffered by migrants and minorities in European and American cities. Her life experience included teaching and doing research in several parts of the USA that prompted her continuous comparison between North American and European cities. She based her analysis on wide array of research that tackled the motivations of the complex web of actors. Her scholarship has greatly contributed to our understanding and knowledge of policies and of the challenges of increasing urban violence fuelled by social inequalities on both sides of the Atlantic.
Enzo Mingione is Professor of Sociology at the University of Milano-Bicocca
Mike Hough
I first met Sophie – I think – at a meeting she organised at the 2009 European Society of Criminology conference in Ljubljana to discuss whether there should be a European Handbook of Criminology. The idea had originated at the final meeting of the EU-funded CRIMPREV project, where Sophie posed the question whether European criminology was over-reliant on Anglo-American texts. The consensus at the Ljubljiana meeting was that the idea was definitely worth pursuing, and that Sophie should assemble a small group to take the project forward.
Sophie continued as the driving force behind the idea of a European Handbook. She set up the handbook working group in late 2009 with Klara Kerezsi, René Levy and Sonja Snacken, with some funding from René’s GERN project. Sophie invited me to become the fifth editor, and I leapt at the opportunity. Given its scale and ambition, the handbook took shape very quickly indeed. Over a series of meetings in Paris and Budapest, we agreed on the overall shape of the book, identified preferred contributors, submitted first an outline proposal and then a detailed proposal to our preferred publisher, Routledge, and signed a book contract early in 2011. We secured agreement from over 40 authors to produce a total of 28 chapters, and my recollection is that almost everyone we approached agreed to take part. We submitted the final manuscript in Autumn 2012 and published a year later, with a launch at the 2013 ESC conference in Budapest.
Working with Sophie on this project was a delight. Although the five editors all worked together very effectively, in my eyes she was the ‘first amongst equals’. Her combination of warmth, charm, intellectual acuity and good humour energised the project, and ensured that it proceeded smoothly. Without her deft encouragement and subtle pressure, I doubt whether such a complicated endeavour could have been brought to such a successful conclusion in such a short time. I feel very privileged to have worked with someone with such qualities and charisma.
Mike Hough is Emeritus Professor at the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London