I am a historian of gender and empire in the modern Mediterranean, with particular interests in French colonial interventions in the Middle East and North Africa before, during, and after the First World War. Before coming to Pitt, I was a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University, and I held a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy from 2018-2019. I received my PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018, and my BA from Swarthmore College.
Education & Training
- Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2018
- MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2012
- BA, Swarthmore College, 2007
Representative Publications
- "Scandal in Fin-de-Siecle Beirut: Gender, Morality, and Imperial Prestige between France and Lebanon," Journal of World History 28 no. 4, Special Issue: Gender and Empire (Dec. 2017): 371-393.
- "Women's Honour and the Black Shame: Coloured Frenchmen and Respectable Comportment in the Post-World War I Occupied Rhineland," German History 33, no. 4 (Dec. 2015): 546-569.
Research Interests
In my research and teaching alike, I am interested in how sites of imperial encounters between Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East inform modern histories of race, gender, nation, and migration. My current project, "Colonizing the Great War: Race, Sex, and Violence in Imperial Borderlands," follows two sets of French colonial troops during and after the First World War as they were mobilized, redeployed, and mistrusted across borders and amongst local populations. I am also at work on two articles that explore tensions between French nuns and industrialists in early twentieth-century Lebanon and between Lebanese volunteers, spies, and French military personnel in the eastern Mediterranean during wartime.
Fields:
- Modern Europe
- European Colonialism
- Modern Mediterranean History
- Histories of Gender and Sexuality
- Borderlands and Migration
- World War I
- European Fascism
Teaching:
- Global History of Piracy
- Xenophobia in Modern Europe
- Mediterranean World Since 1500
- Is Fascism Back?