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About Me

Jennifer Anne Boittin is a native bilingual French-American who received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University and teaches French and History.  Among many other themes she considers how colonial spaces such as French West Africa, French Indochina and the French Caribbean were shaped by intersections between gender, race, migration and urban culture.  She also focuses upon how such historical questions shape contemporary France.  Using archives, newspapers, literature and film, such intersections shaped her first book, Colonial Metropolis:  The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (University of Nebraska Press 2010, paperback spring 2015).  She has also published extensively on the Nardal sisters, anti-imperialism, masculinities, black and African diaspora, Josephine Baker, Negritude thinkers and women travelers in journals such as French Politics, Culture & Society, Gender & History, French Colonial History and Historical Reflections.  In 2015 some of her recent research appeared in Signs.  Her new book project is about women who resisted policing by the French Empire in the twentieth century.

Recent Publications

“‘The rot that remains’: aphasia and France’s multiple temporalities of race and colonialism,” Postcolonial Studies 21, no. 4 (2018): 515-519.

“‘Are You Trying to Play a French Woman?’ La Mère Patrie and the Female Body in French West Africa,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 841-864.

“Adventurers and Agents Provocateurs: German Women Traveling Through French West Africa in the Shadow of War,” in “War, Occupation and Empire in France and Germany,” guest editor Jean Pedersen, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 40, 1 (2014): 111-131.

“The Militant Black Men of Marseille and Paris, 1927-1937,” in Black France: The History, Poetics and Politics of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), edited by Trica Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Tyler Stovall: 221-246.

“‘Among Them Complicit’? Life and Politics in France’s Black Communities, 1919 -1939,” in Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), edited by Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft: 55-75.

“Hierarchies of Race and Gender in the French Empire,” co-author with Christina Firpo and Emily Musil Church, Firpo, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 37, 1 (2011): 60-90.

Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Feminism and Anti-Imperialism in Interwar Paris. The University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE: 2010). Paperback edition, summer 2015.

“Intersections of Race and Gender in French History,” co-editor with Tyler Stovall, special issue, French Historical Studies, 33, 3 (Summer 2010).

“Introduction: Who is French?” co-author with Tyler Stovall, in “Intersections of Race and Gender in French History,” edited by Jennifer Anne Boittin and Tyler Stovall, special issue, French Historical Studies 33, no. 3 (2010): 349-356.

“Black in France: The Language and Politics of Race during the Late Third Republic,” French Politics, Culture & Society 27, 2 (Summer 2009): 23-46.

“In Black and White: Gender, Race Relations and the Nardal Sisters in Interwar Paris,” French Colonial History 6 (2005): 119-135.

Media Coverage

https://imbrications.hypotheses.org/189; “La France vue de l'étranger (2/5) Luttes féministes, anti-coloniales, anti-racistes,” Les Nouvelles Vagues, France Culture, Paris, France, March 7, 2017; “Tumulte Noir à Paris,” Africa4 blog article pub

Social Media

Country Focus

French Empire

Expertise by Geography

Africa, Caribbean, France, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

20th century, 21st century

Expertise by Topic

Colonialism, Gender, Migration & Immigration, Race, Rebellion & Revolution, Sexuality, Urban History, Women