Caroline Séquin

Associate Professor

610 330 5175

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 in the fall of 2019 after earning 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. Her first book, Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in Colonial Senegal and France, 1848-1950 (Cornell University Press, 2024) uncovers the intertwined histories of commercial sex and racial politics in France and colonial Senegal in the century following the abolition of slavery. She is now working on the history of binational marriages, family migration, citizenship, and belonging 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, 2024).

Winner of the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize.

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

WGS 243: Global Sexualities

HIST 350: France from the Margins: History of Modern France