I am a historian of modern Europe and military history and an assistant professor at Florida International University. My work focuses on France, its empire, and its connections to the wider world, with particular emphases on decolonization, the Cold War, counterinsurgency, and migration.
My first book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, explores the connections between French military practices in North Africa and the broader historical processes of decolonization and the global Cold War. The violent struggle for Algerian independence that raged from 1954 to 1962 destroyed the legitimacy of colonial rule, rewrote the rules of international diplomacy, and helped launch the Third Worldist political project. And quietly, outside the spotlight cast by the more visible drama of these changes, the conflict also transformed the nature of modern warfare. As French commanders sought to counter Algerian Revolutionaries with their own modernizing revolution, they pioneered new techniques of surveillance and control that transformed war into an exercise in social engineering. As French officers eagerly shared their new theories and practices with foreign militaries, I argue, they helped forge a new paradigm of warfare that came to dominate the Cold War: counterinsurgency. You can preorder the book from Cornell University Press here.
More broadly, I write on the French military’s international relations, Cold War networks of defense expertise, and migrant policing. You can see some of my recent articles and opinion pieces here. My second book project examines the history of the Rivesaltes Camp in southern France, which served as a site of confinement for a multitude of migrant populations from 1938 until 2007: Spanish Republicans, Jewish refugees, Algerian harkis, and a string of others whose status in the eyes of the French state fluctuated between the poles of refugee and prisoner. By studying Rivesaltes’ diverse roles as a site of incarceration, refuge, and colonial integration side-by-side, Internment: The Rivesaltes Camp and the History of Modern France helps to explain why internment camps became—and remain—a central tool for states in the Global North to manage human movement.
Another axis of ongoing research focuses on military academies like the École supérieure de guerre in Paris to examine the explosion of military exchanges that developed after 1945. As the French, British, and American militaries sought to learn from each others’ post-WWII experiences of conflict and nations in the Global South sought to rapidly professionalize amidst the Cold War, military academies became hubs for the making and maintenance of transnational exchange. Provisionally entitled Soldiers Without Borders: Allied Military Academies and the Globalization of Strategic Culture After 1945, the project seeks to understand how such exchanges transformed and institutionalized power relationships between Europe, the U.S., Latin America, and Africa.
At Florida International University, I teach an introductory course on modern Europe, as well as upper-level courses on war and society, the Second World War, and Islam in Europe. I also teach and advise graduate students on a range of topics in my areas of expertise. You can find course descriptions and syllabi here.
