RESEARCH INTERESTS:

I am an historian of modern Europe with a particular interest in how expansionist and colonialist policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shaped both European and non-European societies.  My first book, An Empire Divided, published by Oxford University Press, examines how conflict between religious missionaries and a host of anticlerical critics defined French colonial policies and “civilizing” ideologies in the empire, especially in Indochina, Madagascar, and Polynesia.  I am currently working on a second book, entitled “The Moral Geography of Empire: Violence, Suffering, and European Colonial Rule, 1880-1940,” that explores how Europeans understood, responded to, and often ignored humanitarian crises caused or exacerbated by colonialism.

CURRENT RESEARCH:

The Melancholy of Progress: Violence, Suffering, and the Moral Geography of European Imperialism, 1850-1930 (book project in progress).

COURSES TAUGHT:

• Europe and the Modern World
• Histories of Colonial Contact in the Americas, the Pacific, and Africa
• The Ethics of Imperialism
• Cultures of Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe
• The History and Legacy of French Imperialism, 1830-Present
• Europe and the Colonial Experience (graduate)
• Modern Europe: The 19th Century (graduate)
• Modern France (graduate)

PUBLICATIONS:

• An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
• “When Argentina Was French: Rethinking Cultural Politics and European Imperialism in Belle-Époque Buenos Aires” (currently under review at the Journal of Modern History)
• “Recasting Pigneau de Béhaine: French Missionaries and the Politics of Colonial History,” in Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid, eds., Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
• “A Colonial Affair?: Dreyfus and the French Empire,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 31: 3 (Fall 2005): 469-84.
• “Kings of the Mountains: Mayréna, Missionaries, and French Colonial Divisions in 1880s Indochina,” Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction 25: 3/4 (2001): 185-217.  Reprinted in: Eric Jennings, ed., French Colonial Indochina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming).
• “Sketches of the Poilu’sWorld: Trench Cartoons from the Great War,” in Douglas Mackaman and Michael Mays, eds., World War I and the Cultures of Modernity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000).

NATIONAL FELLOWSHIPS AND PRIZES:

• John Philip Coghlan Fellow, Stanford University, 2006-2008
• American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2006-2007
• William and Flora Hewlett Endowment Fund Fellowship, Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, 2005
• Stanford Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship, Stanford University, 2002-2004
• Pew Charitable Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center on Religion and Democracy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2002-2003
• Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, 2001-2002
• Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 2000-2001
• Dissertation Fellowship, Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California, San Diego, 2000-2001
• Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fellowship, Stanford, California, 2000-2001
• John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Prize, American Catholic Historical Association, 2000
• Henry Morse Stephens Memorial Travel Grant, U.C. Berkeley, 1999-2000
• Sidney Hellman Ehrman Travel Grant, U.C. Berkeley, 1999-2000
• Allan Sharlin Memorial Fellowship, Institute for International Studies, U.C. Berkeley, 1998-1999
• J. William Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, France, 1998-1999
• Sather Fellowship, U.C. Berkeley, 1995-1996