Participant Info

First Name
Christian
Last Name
Crouch
Country
(Country)
State
NY New York
Affiliation
Bard College
Website URL
http://historicalstudies.bard.edu/faculty/
Keywords
Atlantic History, Borderlands and French Empire, New France, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Ethiopia, Cultural History of War, Cultural Repatriation
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Christian Ayne Crouch is Associate Professor of Historical Studies and Director of American Studies at Bard College. She is the author of Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France (Cornell University Press 2014) which received the 2015 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Prize of the French Colonial Historical Society for the best book in French colonial history, 1600-1815. A scholar of the Atlantic world, borderlands, and intercultural exchange, she is currently researching and writing, Queen Victoria’s Captives: A Story of Ambition, Empire, and a Stolen Ethiopian Prince, a history of the human consequences of the 1867-68 British military expedition to Ethiopia. Widely publicized in its day, the Magdala Campaign “liberated” European captives taken by Emperor Tewodros II and brought Tewodros’ treasury and orphaned son as spoils of war to England. Using textual, oral, and visual archives, this book uncovers the story of the Magdala captives, both those freed and those made by the campaign, and the entangled, unfulfilled expectations of British and Ethiopian imperial ambitions. This work connects these past narratives to the present, showing the potent unresolved legacy of the campaign through Ethiopia’s continuing demands for repatriation of national patrimony and current issues of public pressure on Western states to liberate their hostage citizens and recognize state’s roles in the growing crisis of forced migration.

Recent Publications

Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France. (Cornell University Press, 2014).

“Surveying the Past; Projecting the Future: Reevaluating French Colonial Plans of Kanesetake,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vo. 75, No. 2 (April 2018): 109-128 (special joint issue with Early American Literature).

“Between Lines: Language, Intimacy, and Voyeurism during Global War,” in Thomas Truxes, ed., France, Ireland, and the Atlantic in a Time of War: Reflections on the Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757 (Routledge 2017).

“The Black City: African and Indian Exchanges in Pontiac’s Detroit” Early American Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2, (Spring 2016): 284-318.

“Seven Years’ War,” Invited Essay for the Princeton Companion to Atlantic History, edited Joseph C. Miller (Princeton University Press 2015).

“‘Je me vois réduit…à la mendicité’: Marine veterans of New France and their new Atlantic world” in Atlantic Biographies: Individuals and Peoples in the Atlantic World, ed. Jeffrey Fortin and Mark Meeuwese. (Brill 2013).

 

 

Media Coverage
I was interviewed for the UN&Africa podcast about the legacies of TransAtlantic slavery and you can hear it on SoundCloud here: https://news.un.org/en/audio/2018/05/1009632 A video of my talk at the UN #RememberSlavery Global Student Videoconferen
Country Focus
Atlantic World, Ethiopia, France, United States, early Canada
Expertise by Geography
Atlantic, France, United States
Expertise by Chronology
18th century, 19th century, Early Modern
Expertise by Topic
American Founding Era, Colonialism, Diplomacy, Indigenous Peoples, Military, Rebellion & Revolution, Slavery