The W. J. Eccles Prize is awarded annually to the graduate student judged to have presented the best paper at the Society’s Annual Meeting. The Prize honors the memory of William John Eccles (1917-1998), a distinguished historian of French Canada and an outstanding supporter of graduate students. The Prize was created by Bill Eccles’s FCHS colleagues to continue his work by encouraging those at the beginning of their careers in our field. From 2000 to 2018, the Prize was awarded to the best article published in French Colonial History by a graduate student or recent post-graduate scholar. In 2019, the Prize was repurposed for the best graduate student paper presented at our annual meeting.
Chaque année, le prix W. J. Eccles s’est décerné à un.e doctorant.e jugé.e d’avoir présenté la meilleure intervention au congrès annuel de la Société de l’Histoire Coloniale Française. Ce prix honore la mémoire de William John Eccles (1917-1998), un éminent historien du Canada Français et un partisan exceptionnel des doctorant.e.s. Le prix Eccles s’est créé par les collègues de Bill Eccles au sein de la SHCF avec l’intention de poursuivre son travail en soutenant ceux qui sont en début de leur carrière dans notre domain. De 2000 à 2018, le prix s’est décerné au meilleur article publié dans French Colonial History par un.e doctorant.e ou un.e chercheur/se en début de carrière. À partir de 2019, le prix s’est modifié pour reconnaître la meilluere intervention d’un.e doctorant.e lors de notre congrès annuel.
Application Procedures
Panel Chairs and Discussants are urged to nominate graduate students for this prize. Please contact graduate students and encourage them to submit their presentation materials. Graduate students are encouraged to self-nominate for this prize.
Graduate students should submit an electronic copy of their presented paper and any accompanying visual materials to the Vice-President of the French Colonial Historical Society at vice-president@frenchcolonial.org within one week of the conclusion of the annual conference.
Les président.e.s et les discutant.e.s des sessions sont invité.e.s à proposer la candidature des doctorant.e.s pour ce prix. Veuillez communiquer avec les doctorant.e.s et les encourager à soumettre les documents de leur intervention (écrits et visuels). Les doctorant.e.s sont aussi encouragé.e.s à l’auto-proposition de candidature pour ce prix.
Les doctorant.e.s doivent soumettre une copie éléctronique de leur intervention présenté et tout matériel visuel d’accompagnement au vice-président.e de la Société de l’Histoire Coloniale Française à vice-président@frenchcolonial.org avant la fin de la semaine suivante le congrès annuel.
2024 Eccles Prize Winner
Rachel Sarcevic-Tesanovic, Northwestern University, “Forging New Paths: Intimate Ties and Economic Strategies in the Lives of Free Women of African Descent from Saint-Domingue to Louisiana”
In her engaging and insightful paper, Rachel Sarcevic-Tesanovic examines free women of color in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue who worked as ménagères or “housekeepers,” a euphemism that could mean more than just keeping house. Sarcevic-Tesanovic’s interesting take on negotiating gendered power relations reframes our understanding of ménagères from a socio-economic perspective, arguing that these women made decisions as economic actors, using their positions and extralegal relationships with employers to gain wealth and improve their situations and often those of their children as well. The paper is persuasively argued and solidly researched, making good use of varied sources.
Dans son article attrayant et lucide, Rachel Sarcevic-Tesanovic examine les femmes libres de couleur à Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe siècle qui travaillaient comme ménagères, un euphémisme qui pouvait signifier bien plus que simplement faire le ménage. La prise de position de Sarcevic-Tesanovic sur la négociation des relations de pouvoir entre les sexes recadre ce que nous savons des ménagères d’un point de vue socio-économique, en soutenant que ces femmes prenaient des décisions en tant qu’acteurs économiques, utilisant leurs positions et leurs relations extralégales avec les employeurs pour améliorer leur situation économique, et souvent celle de leurs enfants. L’article est écrit d’une manière convaincante et solidement documenté, faisant bon usage de sources variées.
2024 Honorable Mention
Tayzhaun Glover, “Transmarine Marronage, Enslaved Women and Children, and the Abolition of Slavery in Dominica, Martinique, and St. Lucia, 1824-1839”
Eccles Prize Past Winners
2023
Valérie-Ann Edmond-Mariette, Université des Antilles, “Le récit musical de l’esclavage et du colonialisme dans l’imaginaire d’Eugène Mona”
2023 Honorable Mention
Shandiva Banerjee, (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) “Gens de couleur et “métropolité”: une identité impériale en question dans l’espace imperial française”
2022
Camden Elliot (Harvard University) “An Environmental History of the Algonquian Diaspora in New France”
2022 Honorable Mention
Frances Bell (William & Mary) “‘she may make off For S. Domingo and carry her child thither”: Free Soil, Family, and the Haitian Diaspora in the Early United States”
2019
Joseph la Hausse de Lalouvière (Harvard University), “Illegal Enslavement? Reparations for Slavery’s Restoration in 1802”
2019 Honorable Mentions
Jakob Burnham (Georgetown University), “Frenchmen Don’t Marry Slaves: Social Ordering and Archival Disparities in Colonial Pondichéry”.
Deirdre T. Lyons (University of Chicago), “‘We are Free, We Marry,’ They Say : Republican Emancipation and Marriage in the French Antilles, 1848-1852”
Best Article Published in French Colonial History by a Graduate Student or Recent Ph.D., 2000-2018
2011
Christine Mussard (Université de Provence), “Une décolonisation par défaut : les mouvements migratoires des colons de l’Algérie vers la Tunisie – cas de Lacroix, centre de colonisation de la commune mixte de La Calle (1920 – 1950),” French Colonial History 13 (2012), pp.55-72.
2010
Aline Demay (Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), “Saigon: une métropole touristique?” French Colonial History 12 (2011), pp. 123-142.
2009
M. Kathryn Edwards (University of Toronto), “Traître au colonialisme? The Georges Boudarel Affair and the Memory of the Indochina War.” French Colonial History 11 (2010), pp. 193-210.
2008
Marie Rodet (University of Vienna), “‘Le délit d’abandon du domicile conjugal’ ou l’invasion du pénal colonial dans les jugements des “tribunaux indigènes” au Soudan Français (1900-1947),” French Colonial History 10 (2009), pp. 151-169.
2006
Reine-Claude Grondin (Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne), “L’Empire palimpseste : l’exemple des années trente dans le Limousin,” French Colonial History 7 (2006), pp. 165-180.
Honorable Mention: Thomas Peace (York University), “Deconstructing the Sauvage/Savage in the Writing of Samuel de Champlain and Captain John Smith,” French Colonial History 7 (2006), pp. 1-20.
2005
Michelle Cheyne (Rutgers University), “Pyracmond, ou les Creoles : L’articulation d’une hierarchie des roles raciaux sur la scene francaise sous la Restauration,” French Colonial History 6 (2005), pp.79-102.
2004
Benoît Grenier (Université Laval), “‘Nulle terre sans seigneur?’ Une étude comparative de la présence seigneuriale (France-Canada), XVIIe-XIXe siècle,” French Colonial History 5 (2004), pp.7-24.
Ibra Sene (Michigan State University), “Colonisation française et main-d’oeuvre carcérale au Sénégal: De l’emploi des détenus des camps penaux sur les chantiers des travaux routiers (1927-1940),” French Colonial History 5 (2004), pp.153-171.
2003
Spencer Segalla, “Georges Hardy and Educational Ethnology in French Morocco, 1920-1926.” French Colonial History 4 (2003) pp. 171-190. Spencer Segalla was a doctoral student at Stony Brook University when the prize was awarded.
The William Shorrock Travel Award is presented annually to help defray travel costs for graduate students presenting papers at the French Colonial Historical Society’s annual meeting. In addition to being a long time member and past President of the society, Bill Shorrock was a passionate supporter of graduate students. This award honors his memory and continues his work as a mentor by providing travel assistance to those just beginning their careers in the field of French colonial history.
Graduate students interested in applying for this award should submit their application between 15 September and 15 November 2024. Graduate students wishing to be considered for the Shorrock Travel Award must provide an estimated budget of travel expenses (including other anticipated sources of funding) and a brief statement formally applying for the award. Please note that all participants in the annual meeting must be members in good standing of the Society.
The application may be found here.
La bourse de voyage William Shorrock est décernée chaque année pour aider avec les frais de voyage les doctorant.e.s qui donnent les interventions au congrès annuel de la Société Historique Coloniale Française. En plus d’être un membre de longue date et ancien président de la société, Bill Shorrock était un partisan dévoué aux doctorant.e.s. Ce prix honore sa mémoire et poursuit son travail comme mentor en offrant une aide au voyage à ceux qui sont au début de leur carrière dans le domaine de l’histoire coloniale française.
Des doctorant.e.s souhaitant de candidater pour la prix Shorrock doivent remplir et soumettre leur dossier entre 15 septembre et 15 novembre 2024 (inclus). Des doctorant.e.s qui souhaitent être considérés pour la bourse de voyage Shorrock doivent fournir un budget estimative des frais de voyage (y compris les autres sources de financement prévues) et une brève declaration sollicitant officiellement la bourse. Veuillez noter que tous les participants à l’assemblée annuelle doivent être membres en règle de la Société.
Veuillez trouver l’application ici.
William Shorrock Travel Award Winners
2024
Camille Cordier, LARHRA, Université Lyon, Lumière, “L’intégration des ‘marchandes de couleur’ dans le secteur du commerce alimentaire au Cap-Français : les besoins d’une approche comparative.”
Zohar Sapir Dvir, Tel Aviv University, “Networks of Mobility: The Structuring of Colonial Automobility in the French Imperial Mediterranean.”
Keanu Heydari, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, “A Secret Desire for Liberation: Iranian Student Radicals’ Imagination of France, National Liberation, and Artistic Development in the 1950s.”
Alanna Louks, Queen’s University, “The Grey Nuns of Montréal: Intimacies and Connections in a Conventual Household, 1727-1771.”
Abbey Warchol, University of North Caroline, Chapel Hill, “‘African girls are preparing their future!’ French West African Girlhood, Citizenship, and Social Change, 1955-1958.”
2023
Shandiva Banerjee, “Gens de couleur et ‘métropolité’ : une identité administrative en question dans l’espace impérial français (fin XVIIIe, début XIXe)”
Olivia Cocking, “Repurposing the Police: North African Migrants and the Limits of the Imperial State in Interwar Paris”
Michael LaMonica, “Seafaring, Slavery, and Mariners of Colour Aboard Prize Captures in the French West Indies”
Damiët Schneeweisz, “Charlotte Martner’s ‘Animated Ivories’: A Portrait Miniaturist in Martinique (1803-1822)”
2022
Léa Coffineau, “Becoming Black and French: A New Postcolonial Diaspora in New York City”
Camden Elliot, “An Environmental History of the Algonquin Diaspora in New France”
Joy Nyokabi Karinge, “Black French: Expression and Repression of African Identity and Culture of Black Diasporans in Paris, 1834-1942”
Nicole Esmer Marcel, “Placemaking in Nyugen Smith’s Bundlehouse”
Adélaïde Marine-Gougeon, «Les horizons atlantiques des Blancs créoles de la Martinique: à la recherche de l’Amérique française fantôme»
2019
Michaela Kleber, “Native Women Order the Disorder in French Illinois”
Deirdre Lyons, “’We are Free, We Marry,’ They Say: Republican Emancipation and Marriage in the French Antilles, 1848-1852”
2018
Kevin Li, “The Ambiguous Résistants: The Bình Xuyên as Patriotic Collaborators during the First Indochina War”
Samuel Dersken, “‘It is indispensable that our Indian tribes be provided with their accustomed goods’: Liquor and Social Power in the Pays des Illinois, 1750-1803”
Elizabeth Jacob, “‘This Matter Can Only Be Settled with 10,000 Deaths’: Land, Labor, and Violence in Colonial Côte d’Ivoire”
Elyssa Gage, “Writing and Rewriting Ourika: The Black Woman, Integration, and the Colonial Project”
Aziza Doudou, “Fragmentations identitaires des soldats marocains durant la guerre d’Indochine”
Pauline Moskowski-Ouargli, “L’impact de la migration des femmes dans la construction de l’espace colonial français au XVIIIème siècle. Le cas des femmes des réseaux coloniaux à Bordeaux”
2017
Caroline Séquin, “Fermeture des maisons de tolérance et sexualité interraciale dans le Dakar d’après-guerre”
John Boonstra, “Proclaiming Allegiance and Promising Protection: Affective Discourses and Debates over Intervention between France and Lebanon during the Great War”
2016
Melody Shum, “Colonial Childhood in French Kwang Chow Wan (1930’s-1940’s)”
Adrienne Tyrey, “Separate but Equal? Arab vs Berber Education under the French Protectorate of Morocco, and the Case of Arabic at the Collège berbère d’Azrou”
2014
Amandine Dabat, “Contourner l’exil : les réseaux de communication de l’empereur vietnamien Hàm Nghi (1871-1944) entre l’Algérie française et l’Indochine”
Isabelle Flour, “Casting Angkor: Reconstructing Khmer Architecture at the Musée Indochinois and Universal Expositions in France (1867-1937)”
2012
Michelle Pinto, “Africanization in the Postwar French Empire: Concept and Program for Modernization”
Claire Edington, “Mettray Overseas: Juvenile Justice Reform Between France and Indochina, 1905-1945″
The Boucher Prize is awarded in honor of long-time members and active supporters Mary Alice and Philip Boucher, and recognizes the best book on the French colonial experience from the 16th century to 1815.
Books from any academic discipline will be considered, providing that they approach the French colonial experience from a historical perspective.
Le prix Boucher est décerné en l’honneur des membres de longue date et partisans actifs Mary Alice et Philip Boucher, et récompense le meilleur livre sur l’expérience coloniale française du XVIe siècle à 1815.
Les livres de n’importe quelle discipline académique seront considérés, à condition qu’ils abordent l’expérience coloniale française d’un point de vue historique.
- Dr. Scott Berthelette
Queen’s University
- Dr. Danna Agmon
Virginia Tech
- Dr. Eric Jennings
University of Toronto
- Dr. Arthur Asseraf
University of Cambridge
Please send inquiries to the Chair of the committee via bookprizes@frenchcolonial.org. Submissions of books published in 2024 will be accepted between January 1, 2025 to February 28, 2025.
Veuillez envoyer des demandes de renseignements au président du comité par mél à bookprizes@frenchcolonial.org. Le délai de soumission des livres publiés en 2024 seront acceptées du 1er janvier 2025 au 28 février 2025.
2024 Boucher Book Prize Winner
Sara E. Johnson, Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
The winner of the 2024 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Prize is Sara E. Johnson’s Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World. This dazzlingly original study is built around one of the most well-known intellectual and political figures of 18th century Saint-Domingue, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry. Johnson painstakingly reconstitutes a ‘communal biography’ of all the people around this man, most of them enslaved and rendered invisible. The Encyclopédie Noire does not just make the important point that Moreau de Saint-Méry, much like other white men like him, was not an Enlightenment intellectual despite being a enslaver, but because of it, as the economic and intellectual system of slavery what made his work possible. It also goes well beyond this, as Johnson rethinks the way we understand knowledge generated under these conditions by experimenting with form. By engaging in rigorous speculation, producing new visual sources with the help of artist Luz Sandoval, and experimenting with typography, Johnson pushes our understanding of historical writing in new directions by engaging with a range of disciplinary methods. Encyclopédie Noire represents not just an innovation for scholars of French colonialism, but repurposes the form of the encyclopaedia to change the way we organise knowledge, in ways that will be helpful to people well beyond this field.
Boucher 2024 Honorable Mention
Marlene Daut’s Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) was awarded an honourable mention for the 2024 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Prize.
2023 Boucher Book Prize Winner
Scott Berthelette, Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire: French-Indigenous Relations and the Rise of the Métis in the Hudson Bay Watershed (McGill-Queens University Press, 2022).
The winner of the 2023 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Prize is Scott Berthelette’s Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire: French-Indigenous Relations and the Rise of the Métis in the Hudson Bay Watershed. This deeply researched study provocatively moves the needle back on historians’ consideration of the métis community, anchoring this history in seventeenth-century narratives rather than in the more familiar mid-to-late nineteenth century. Berthelette’s book beautifully answers the Boucher Prize’s invocation to identify the work best considering “the French colonial experience.” The continental interior, and Hudson Bay watershed where Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire focuses its energies, have been spaces of great interest and extended studies by historians for decades, with the “middle ground” looming large in historical imaginaries of early French Atlantic worlds. Yet, as Berthelette puts forth in this accessibly-written and briskly-paced work, there is a great deal of room to probe the messy, and more revealingly complex, interactions of Indigenous and settler colonial men, women, and children who made and then repeatedly remade this world. Berthelette offers considerations of the term métis, which has valences both historiographically and also in regards to lived experience, as a mobile category whose very definition mirrors the slippery and significant experience of the community itself. Weaving together Indigenous lives intersecting through trade, kinship, war and, ultimately, community (re)formation, with French voyageurs, settler colonists, and imperial bureaucrats, Berthelette coaxes from familiar sources a textured and rich story of both people and place, and productively resets the turning points and agents of new political formation in the early French colonial era.
Boucher 2023 Honorable Mention
Manuel Covo, Entrepôt of Revolutions: Saint-Domingue, Commercial Sovereignty, and the Franco-American Alliance (Oxford University Press, 2022), was awarded an honorable mention for the 2022 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize.
2022 Boucher Book Prize Winner
Tessa Murphy, The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
Tessa Murphy’s The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean is the winner of the 2022 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher prize. Drawing together multiple vantage points, most notably those of the indigenous Kalinago who crisscrossed and connected the eastern Caribbean by canáoa, Murphy offers a sea-level history focused on the everyday. The result is a remarkable and engaging account of the Lesser Antilles that views the islands not as isolated land masses but rather as an aquaeous, interconnected geography and home to a creolized community of Kalinago, Africans, and Europeans who thwarted, challenged, limited, and shaped French and British imperial ambitions. In following the navigation routes that linked these islands, The Creole Archipelago decenters nationally-focused histories and single island studies. Instead Murphy adopts a trans-imperial framework to carefully trace how these inhabitants built their lives and communities at the intersecting edges of multiple empires and also how violent confrontations after the Seven Years’ War, which culminated in Fedon’s Rebellion and Second Carib war, resulted in their forced displacement. Through critical reading of often used sources like census records and maps, Murphy challenges the absence and erasure of Kalinago from histories of the early modern Caribbean. In resituating the Kalinago as central actors in the making of this tumultuous history, The Creole Archipelago fundamentally complicates the way we think about the French Antilles within the broader history of the Caribbean, early Americas, and Atlantic. Equally importantly, Murphy’s work challenges us to write the history of the Caribbean from the sea-level perspective of those who lived and navigated European incursion and the growth of the plantation economy and trans-Atlantic slave system by canoe.
Boucher Prize Past Winners
2021
Laurie M. Wood, Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire (Yale UP)
2020
Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (UNC Press/Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture)
2019
Jean-François Lozier, Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century (McGill-Queens University Press)
2018
Sue Peabody, Madeline’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies(Oxford University Press)
2017
Jennifer L. Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press)
2016
Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World. Recognition after Revolution (University of North Carolina Press)
2015
Christian Ayne Crouch, Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France (Cornell University Press)
2014
Rebecca Rogers, A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth Century Algeria (Stanford University Press)
2013
Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohondro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)
2012
Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Cornell University Press)
The French Colonial Historical Society awards the Heggoy prize in honor of founding member, Alf Andrew Heggoy, annually in recognition of the best book published in the preceding year dealing with the French colonial experience from 1815 to the present.*
Books from any academic discipline will be considered, providing that they approach the French colonial experience from a historical perspective.
La Société d’histoire coloniale française décerne chaque année le prix Heggoy en l’honneur de son membre fondateur, Alf Andrew Heggoy, en reconnaissance du meilleur livre publié l’année précédente traitant de l’expérience coloniale française de 1815 à nos jours.*
Les livres de n’importe quelle discipline académique seront considérés, à condition qu’ils abordent l’expérience coloniale française d’un point de vue historique.
- Scott Berthelette
Queen’s University
- Dr. Danna Agmon
Virginia Tech
- Dr. Eric Jennings
University of Toronto
- Dr. Arthur Asseraf
University of Cambridge
Please send inquiries to the Chair of the committee via bookprizes@frenchcolonial.org. Submissions of books published in 2024 will be accepted between January 1, 2025 to February 28, 2025.
Veuillez envoyer des demandes de renseignements au président du comité par mél à bookprizes@frenchcolonial.org. Le délai de soumission des livres publiés en 2024 seront acceptées du 1er janvier 2025 au 28 février 2025.
*Prior to the inauguration of the Boucher Prize in 2012 the Society awarded the Heggoy prize to the best book on French Colonial history covering any era.
* Avant l’inauguration du prix Boucher en 2012, la Société a décerné le prix Heggoy au meilleur livre sur l’histoire coloniale française couvrant toutes les époques.
2024 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize Winner
Sara Rahnama, The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2023).
The winner of the 2024 Andrew Alf Heggoy prize is Sara Rahnama’s The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria. Drawing together the voices, stories, and experiences of Muslim women in Algeria from a wide range of social and economic backgrounds, Rahnama invites readers to consider the multiplicity of futures still possible in interwar Algeria. By adopting future-orientated thinking as her focal point, Rahnama deftly shifts attention away from well-established narratives about the rise of Algerian nationalism and centers it, instead, on women’s activism and discussions about the role that women and feminism could and would play in shaping the future of Algeria. Through the detailed stories she offers, Rahnama achieves a rare of feat of immersing readers in a previously understudied historical moment of possibility that existed before World War II and the Algerian War, enabling them to momentarily suspend their knowledge of how this history will ultimately unfold. As she reconstructs this landscape of Muslim feminists that looked East, Rahnama changes our understanding of the relationship between gender, Islam, and the French Republic in ways that will prove important for a wide range of fields. Impressively researched and adeptly written, The Future Is Feminist is a model for how to integrate, without flattening, a rich cross-section of experiences and voices across multiple social categories into a compelling narrative of possibility.
2024 Honorable Mention
Yan Slobodkin’s, The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France’s Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2023) was awarded an honourable mention for the 2024 Andrew Alf Heggoy Prize.
2023 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize Winner
Burleigh Hendrickson, Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar (Cornell University Press, 2022).
Burleigh Hendrickson’s Decolonizing 1968 is the winner of the 2023 Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize. Bringing together student activism in Tunis, Dakar and Paris, Hendrickson’s ambitious work transforms our understanding of mai 68by placing anticolonialism at the center of it. Decolonizing 1968 shows how material conditions in universities as well as migration patterns across three countries made the “university as postcolonial battleground.” By asking precisely what was postcolonial about the late 1960s, Hendrickson reveals enduring links between the metropole and its former colonies and the transnational student activism that was both shaped by it and attempted to transform this world. This story, Hendrickson shows, starts in Tunis in March 1968 rather than in Paris, and extends well into the 1970s and the birth of political pluralism in Senegal. Splendidly researched in Tunisia, Senegal, and France, Decolonizing 1968 is a model of how to conduct in-depth archival research in multiple locations and how to weave these complicated stories together. Hendrickson is careful not to flatten the different contexts and temporalities that he engages, showing both the connections and differences between the three spaces at which he looks. The book touches on everything from Négritude to Palestinian nationalism, Maoism and trade unionism to offer a “postcolonial version of 1968.” Hendrickson’s sensitive history likewise engages with questions of migration and tiers-mondisme in metropolitan France. Elegantly researched and persuasively written, Decolonizing 1968 ultimately helps reshape our visions of both May 1968 and the long decolonization process.
2023 Honorable Mention
Guillaume Lachenal, The Doctor who would be King (Duke University Press, 2022), translated by Cheryl Smeall, was awarded an honorable mention for the 2023 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize.
Emily Marker, Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Cornell University Press, 2022), was awarded an honorable mention for the 2023 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize.
Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize Past Winners
2022
Sarah Ann Frank, Hostages of Empire: Colonial Prisoners of War in Vichy France (University of Nebraska Press)
2021
M’hamed Oualdi, A Slave Between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa (Columbia University Press)
2020
Joshua Cole, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Cornell University Press)
2019
Bonnie Effros, Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa (Cornell University Press)
2018
Christopher Church, Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press)
2017
Caroline Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam Colonial. Repenser le métissage (CTHS-INHA)
2016
Emily Burrill, States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali (Ohio University Press)
2015
Elizabeth Heath, Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France: Global Economic Crisis and the Racialization of French Citizenship, 1870-1910 (Cambridge University Press)
2014
Elizabeth A. Foster, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Empire (Stanford University Press)
2013
Charles Keith, Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation (University of California Press)
2012
Daniel J. Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-1975 (University of Chicago Press)
2011
Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, C. 1800-1900 (University of California Press)
2010
Jay Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion (Yale University Press)
2009
Kenneth Orosz, Religious Conflict and the Evolution of Language Policy in German and French Cameroon, 1885-1939 (Peter Lang/American University Studies)
2008
Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (Harvard University Press)
2007
J.P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (New York: Oxford, 2006)
2006
Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-century Mauritius (Duke University Press)
2005
Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press)
2004
Christelle Taraud, La prostitution coloniale (Éditions Payot)
2003
Ken Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea (McGill/Queens University Press)
2002
Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics (Stanford University Press)
2001
Peter Moogk, La Nouvelle France (Michigan State University Press)
2000
Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom (Greenwood)
1998
Leslie Choquette, Frenchmen into Peasants (Harvard University Press)
1997
Tanis C. Thorne, The Many Hands of my Relations (University of Missouri Press)
1996
Phyllis Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge University Press)
1995
Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1914) (University of California Press)
1994
R. David Edmunds and Joe Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mesquakie Challenge to New France (University of Oklahoma Press)
1993
Philip Boucher, Cannibal Encounters (Johns Hopkins University Press)
1992
Doug Porch, The French Foreign Legion (Harper Collins)
1991
Serge Courville, Entre ville et campagne. L’essor du village dans les seigneuries du Bas-Canada (Presses de l’Université Laval)
1990
Christopher Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa (Cambridge)
1989
Bill Shorrock, From Ally to Enemy (Kent State University Press)
1988
Carl Brasseaux, The Founding of New Acadia (Louisiana State University Press)
1987
Carl Ekberg, Colonial Sainte-Genevieve (Patrice Press)
1986
John Hargreaves, West Africa Partitioned. Vol. 2, The Elephants and the Grass (University of Wisconsin Press)
1985
Bill Hoisington, The Casablanca Connection (U. North Carolina Press)
1981
Bill Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans (Indiana U. Press)
1977
Cornelius Jaenen, Friend and Foe (Columbia University Press)
The Sue Peabody Prize is awarded to help fund travel to and participation in the annual meeting by a colleague at a scholarly institution outside North America or Europe. The Peabody Prize honors the contributions of Sue Peabody, former FCHS President, for her outstanding commitment to inclusivity and diversity in the field of French colonial history, and for her ongoing contributions to the Society and the field.
Recipients of the award must present at the FCHS/SHCF annual conference. Recipients must hold a full-time position at a scholarly institution outside of the United States or continental Europe.
Application Procedures:
The Society will not award the Sue Peabody Award for the 2024 conference. We hope to increase this fund in order to award this prize annually. You are welcome to contribute to the Sue Peabody Prize here: https://frenchcolonial.org/donations/
Le prix Sue Peabody est décerné pour aider à financer le voyage et la participation à la réunion annuelle d’un collègue d’une institution universitaire à l’extérieur de l’Amérique du Nord ou de l’Europe. Le prix Peabody honore les contributions de Sue Peabody, ancienne présidente de la SHCF, pour son engagement exceptionnel en faveur de l’inclusivité et de la diversité dans le domaine de l’histoire coloniale française, et pour ses contributions continues à la Société et au domaine.
Les récipiendaires du prix doivent présenter à la conférence annuelle FCHS / SHCF. Les bénéficiaires doivent occuper un poste à temps plein dans une institution universitaire en dehors des États-Unis ou de l’Europe continentale.
Procédures d’application:
La Société n’attribuera pas le prix Sue Peabody pour la reunion annuelle de 2024. Nous espérons augmenter ce fonds afin de décerner ce prix chaque année. Vous êtes invités à contribuer au prix Sue Peabody ici : https://frenchcolonial.org/donations/
2023 Peabody Prize Winner: (deferred to 2024)
Sylvain Mbohou, Université de Dschang-Cameroun
2022 Peabody Prize Winner:
Monique Milia Marie-Luce, Université des Antilles, Martinique
2024 Article Prize Call for Submissions
The French Colonial Historical Society (FCHS) will accept submission for its 2024 Article Prize between December 1, 2023 and January 31, 2025. The competition is open to all articles dealing with French Colonial history published in 2024 in either English or French, irrespective of geographic focus or time period. We especially encourage submissions from early career scholars and from scholars based outside of North America. The winner receives a complementary one-year membership to FCHS, along with registration to the annual conference and a small monetary award. Membership in the FCHS is not required, but it is encouraged.
Please contact the chair of the committee with inquiries at articleprize@frenchcolonial.org.
Instructions for submission: Between December 1, 2023 and January 31, 2025, please send an email, with the subject line “FCHS Article Prize Submission,” to articleprize@frenchcolonial.org that includes the name of the article’s author and their contact information. Please attach the nominated article as a PDF.
Appel à candidatures pour son prix de l’article 2024
La Société d’histoire coloniale française (SHCF) acceptera les soumissions pour son Prix de l’article 2024 entre le 1er décembre 2023 et le 31 janvier 2025. Le concours est ouvert à tous les articles traitants de l’histoire coloniale française publiés en 2024 en anglais ou en français, quelles que soient leur orientation géographique ou leur période. Nous encourageons particulièrement les soumissions de chercheur/euses en début de carrière et de chercheur/euses en dehors de l’Amérique du Nord. Le/La laureat.e reçoit une adhésion complémentaire d’un an à la SHCF, ainsi qu’une inscription à la reunion annuelle, et une petite récompense monétaire.L’adhésion à la SHCF n’est pas obligatoire, mais elle est encouragée.
Veuillez contacter le président du comité pour toute question par mél à articleprize@frenchcolonial.org.
Instructions pour la soumission : entre le 1er décembre 2023 et le 31 janvier 2025, veuillez envoyer un e-mail, avec le sujet “FCHS Article Prize Submission”, à articleprize@frenchcolonial.org, en indiquant le nom de l’auteur/rice de l’article et ses coordonnées. Veuillez joindre l’article nominé au format PDF.
2024 Prize Winner
The winner of this year’s Article Prize is Yevan Terrien for “Baptiste and Marianne’s Balbásha’: Enslavement, Freedom, and Belonging in Early New Orleans, 1733–1748,” Journal of American History 110, no. 2 (2023): 230-257. This piece, which details the freedom-seeking of Baptiste and Marianne across their adolescence in colonial New Orleans, provides a thickly-described yet lucid account of the legal and physical geographies these two Chickasaw youths navigated. As Terrien explains, “this article examines scattered clues about Baptiste’s and Marianne’s material, social, and mental worlds to uncover and imagine aspects of enslaved lives usually invisible in the archives.” The author uses an extraordinary archival document—a timeline of the orphans’ escapes, provided by the merchant Gérard Péry to a probate court—as a means to connect scattered mentions elsewhere in the surviving archives. By making these connections, Terrien’s essay humanizes and personalizes the experiences of Marianne and Baptiste and countless people who experienced captivity in the French colonial world. Thoroughly grounded in the historiographies of North American and French Atlantic slavery, marronage, and colonial projects, this article is a notable contribution to our understandings of Louisiana, freedom-seeking, and how theoretically subjugated individuals tested the bounds of French colonialism.
Honorable Mentions:
Julian Weideman’s “‘Tunisian Islam,’” Women’s Rights, and the Limits of French Empire in Twentieth-Century North Africa,” American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2023): 64-88, brilliantly uses the discourse around “Tunisian Islam” to chart the intellectual history of the concept among Muslim scholars in twentieth-century Tunis, including highlighting the important influence of Egyptian—not just French—writers.
Lauren Clay’s “Liberty, Equality, Slavery: Debating the Slave Trade in Revolutionary France,” American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2023): 89-119, makes an important intervention in the historiographies of the French and Haitian Revolutions by tracing how merchant interests scuttled debate over the slave trade in the open years of the French Revolution.
2023 Prize Winner
This year’s prize winner is Claire Eldridge, Associate Professor at the University of Leeds, for her article, “Conflict and Community in the Trenches: Military Justice Archives and Interactions between Soldiers in France’s Armée d’Afrique, 1914-18.” History Workshop Journal, no. 93 (2022): 23-46. See the following write-up thanks to Elizabeth Fink.
The Prize Committee is delighted to award this year’s prize to Claire Eldridge for “Conflict and Community in the Trenches: Military Justice Archives and Interactions between Soldiers in France’s Armée d’Afrique, 1914-18” published in History Workshop Journal, Issue 93. The piece examines the experience of French colonial subjects serving in the First World War through the records of soldiers accused of crimes in military courts. Eldridge mines these rich sources to reveal how the military brought together disparate members of the French Empire, and the conflicts that emerged from colonial subjects and metropolitan citizens encountering one another in new ways. In so doing, Eldridge brings us not just into the conseil de guerre where the accused faced charges, but into the trenches alongside the tirailleurs and the French army who fought and drank and tried to survive. This finely researched and well written article will be of use to scholars of the First World War and empire as well as undergraduate and graduate teaching.
We also have two honourable mentions:
Reuther, Jessica. “Street Hawking or Street Walking in Dahomey?: Debates about Girls’ Sexual Assaults in Colonial Tribunals, 1924-41.” The Journal of African History 63, no. 3 (2022): 368-383.
Franchina, Miriam. “A Transatlantic Battle of Robes: French Priests in the Haitian Revolution.” French History, 2022;, crac002, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crac002
Past Article Prize Winners
2022
Joseph la Hausse de Lalouvière, “A Business Archive of the French Illegal Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” Past and Present 252, no. 1 (Aug. 2021): 139-177.
2021
Lorelle Semley, “Beyond the Dark Side of the Port of the Moon: Rethinking the Role of Bordeaux’s Slave Trade Past,” Histoire sociale/Social History 53, no. 107 (mai/May 2020): 43-68.