Our newest addition to the Department, Professor Caroline Sequin, has been up to so much since joining us at the beginning of this semester! She is currently revising a chapter she wrote on white French women’s migration for sexual labor to colonial Senegal in the early 20th century for the Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism, edited by Dagmar Herzog and Chelsea Shields. She is also reading through and analyzing archival material collected this past summer in the Departmental Archives of Var and in the National Archives of France about military brothels reserved for nonwhite colonial soldiers after World War II. One of these folders required a special authorization to gain access to—it took her two years between when I made the request and when she was finally able to view the documents! In November, she will be the chair and commentator for a panel on the history of sexuality and historical evidence titled “Divining Desires Through Institutions: The Possibilities and Limits of Data,” to take place at the Social Science History Association in Chicago.
Professor Sequin is currently teaching two courses, HIST 227, Race and Migration in Modern Europe, and HIST 105, History of the Modern World. Students for my HIST 105 are producing creative projects for their final assignment and the results promise to be fascinating. Among them, students are currently in a process of creating a podcast, a board game, artwork, a zine, and informational websites.