As the new director of the Center for European and Russian Studies, Laure Murat, with great sadness, is now thinking through ways to organize a program in response to the horrific attacks on her hometown.
Laure Murat didn’t start out with ambitions to become a university professor.
“I hated school,” recalls the Paris native, “I was a very bad student in high school — I just did my baccalauréat” — the rough equivalent of completing a year of college in the U.S. — “and that was it.”
That’s not to say Murat wasn’t intellectually inclined; she was just fiercely independent with wide-ranging interests. So she became a journalist and an art critic, working for Beaux Arts magazine and the “France Culture” public radio program.