Eva Illouz (Arabic: إيفا اللوز ; Hebrew: אווה אילוז) (born April 30, 1961, in Fes, Morocco) is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris as well as at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen.

Eva Illouz was born in Fes, Morocco, and moved to France at the age of ten with her parents.

[4] Since 2015, she is Directrice d'Etudes at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

[citation needed] In 2016, Illouz was the Hedi Fritz Niggli Guest Professor at Zürich University.

[14][1] One dominant theme in Illouz's research concerns the ways in which capitalism has transformed emotional patterns, in the realms of both consumption and production.

[1][14] Illouz’ first book, Consuming the Romantic Utopia, addresses the commodification of romance and the romanticization of commodities.

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.

[18][19][20] 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.

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.