Caroline Séquin
Degrees
- Ph.D., Modern European History, University of Chicago
- Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Chicago
- M.A. Women’s and Gender Studies, Université Paris 8 (France)
- M.A. English and American Studies, Université Nancy 2 (France)
- B.A. English and American Studies, Université Nancy 2 (France)
Biography:
Caroline Séquin joined the History Department at Lafayette College as an assistant professor of Modern European History in the fall of 2019. She earned her PhD in Modern European History from the University of Chicago. She is a social and political historian of modern France and the French Empire who is interested in questions related to race, gender, sexuality, and migration in and out of France. Her first book, Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in Colonial Senegal and France, 1848-1950, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in October 2024. It uncovers the intertwined histories of commercial sex and racial politics in France and colonial Senegal in the century following the abolition of slavery. Her second book
project focuses on the history of binational marriages, family migration, citizenship, andbelonging in the twentieth century.
Her research has received support from the French Colonial Historical Society, the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Western Society for French History. Additionally, her article “Marie Piquemal, the ‘Colonial Madam’: Brothel Prostitution, Migration, and the Making of Whiteness in Interwar Dakar,” published in the Journal of Women’s History, has received the Best Paper Prize from the Council for European Studies’ Gender and Sexuality Research Network.
At Lafayette, she teaches courses on the history of modern France and the French Empire, race and migration in modern Europe, the modern world, sexuality, and historical methods and historiography.
Publications:
Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming).
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501777035/desiring-whiteness/#bookTabs=1
“The Moving Contours of Colonial Prostitution (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 1940-1947),” Clio. Women, Gender, History 50 no. 2 (2019): 19-36.
“Les Contours mouvants de la prostitution coloniale, Fort-de-France, 1940-1947,” Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire 50 (November 2019).
Special mention from the Association des historiens contemporanéistes de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche for best article in contemporary history written by a junior scholar
https://journals.openedition.org/clio/16911
“Marie Piquemal, the ‘Colonial Madam’: Brothel Prostitution, Migration, and the Making of Whiteness in Interwar Dakar,” Journal of Women’s History 33, no. 4 (Winter 2021): 118-141.
https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2021.0047
Best Paper Prize from the Council for European Studies’ Gender and Sexuality Research Network
“White French Women, Colonial Migration, and Sexual Labor Between Metropole and Colony,” in Dagmar Herzog and Chelsea Schields, eds. The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2021).
Courses taught:
FYS 144: Making Sex: Histories of Sexuality
HIST 105: History of the Modern World
HIST 206: Politics and Practice of History
HIST 225: From Revolution to European Union: History of Modern Europe
HIST 227: Race and Migration in Modern Europe
HIST 350: France from the Margins: History of Modern France