Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
I am originally from Albi, in southwestern France. This is where I grew up until I was 15, when I got a scholarship and left my family to go to a school in Dublin, Ireland. I studied there, at Sciences Po (Paris), at the University of Nairobi (Kenya), and at Northwestern University in Chicago. I did a dual Ph.D. at Northwestern and Sciences Po. Now, I’m very happy to be here.
My father was a special education teacher and my father’s mother was a primary school teacher. I became a third-generation school teacher. I think what all of us have in common is that we worked in public schools and — especially my father and I — we’ve had a genuine concern for inclusion because a lot of the young people and children that we’ve worked with face a variety of challenges. In that kind of teaching environment, I think that inclusion really takes on a whole new dimension. That’s something that I’ve inherited from them and have also lived through as part of my own teaching experience. I find that here at U-M, the emphasis on teaching all students, and on reflection on how that can be done in a way that is fair, is something that resonates with my particular personal history.
What does your research focus on?
I study East African intellectual history and focus on Western Kenya. I’m interested in how people talk about the past, how discourse about their own history changes over time, and how colonialism has impacted how people relate to their own history and how they tell it. Before colonial rule, the region of Kenya that I study used oral traditions to pass on knowledge about the past from one generation to the next. So, what kinds of narratives about the past are you really conveying when you’re using this way of passing on knowledge, compared to when you have missionaries and British colonialism, [and] the opening of more colonial schools? When things become written, how does that change how people relate to their history?
In the area of Kenya I was working in, everyone had been doing oral history (the tradition of going and interviewing people and creating a written record from those interviews) since the 1960s and earlier, resulting in a very strong written record of oral history projects. I’m interested in how those interviews were taking place, the kinds of narratives that got sampled, how they got interpreted, and how you make history out of that. One of the aspects I’ve found interesting is that the histories were often narratives told by men. The history is gendered, not just in terms of telling stories about men, but because they were told by men. That shaped how people talked about the past. It’s not that women didn’t do history or that they didn’t talk about the past, but what they said was often seen as “not historical.”
Another thing that I’ve found interesting is the connection with labor migration. In this part of Kenya, people traveled long distances to work in neighboring countries through the 20th century. There’s a tradition of migrant workers going to places, taking up wage employment, and that also shapes how you tell stories about the past. Often, when urban migrants in the colonial and postcolonial eras (1950s–60s) reflected on the history of their ancestors, they paid attention to the stories about the precolonial past that discussed ancient migration experiences, in an attempt to make sense of their own.
How did you become interested in this work?
I was in Kenya when I was 20, studying at the University of Nairobi. It was the year of general elections. People had to explain what they think the problems are, and that requires talking about history in one way or another. So, being an outsider in the middle of that, I wanted to have a better grasp of what was going on around me. Then I went back to France and just kept doing that.
You’ve lived in France, Ireland, Kenya, and the U.S. How have those places and experiences informed your perspective?
Learning about British imperialism in Dublin, from European teachers, versus in Nairobi, from Kenyan professors, prompted me to reflect on what imperialism looked like in France. French imperialism is ancient and its legacy endures around the world and in France, where racism is on the rise. In that context, weaving African history into the curriculum for diverse high school students from middle- to working-class backgrounds, a number of whom have African ancestries that are rarely honored in institutional spaces, can have an empowerment dimension. Researching and teaching African history as a White French academic in the U.S., at the university level, demands that I wrestle with new power imbalances. My journey entails learning to navigate such tensions. I try to do so with an eye to creating dialogue, to serving and respecting the communities that welcome me as much as I can, and to fostering more justice and equality along the way.
How have you experienced DAAS so far?
Here in DAAS, there’s a very rich intellectual community and so I feel extremely lucky to be able to keep on developing both my research and teaching in this kind of environment. I’ve been really inspired to hear about the work that other people are doing here in the department, about their teaching, about their research, and so it’s been a source of inspiration for me. I'm very excited about it.
What do you enjoy doing in your free time?
I do a lot of sports, which started when I was doing my Ph.D. to give myself discipline and structure. I started exercising, and because I don't know how to do things with moderation, I started doing it a lot. I ran half-marathons and I practice Thai boxing. I like it a lot, particularly boxing. [Because] my dad was a special education teacher, I’ve grown up where the modes of behaving are usually modeled after the classroom. This was always something that has been very structuring in my life, and weirdly, you have that in a Thai boxing gym, that kind of structure. You have this relationship with someone who teaches you, and whom you have to respect, and I think a lot of it was actually very familiar.
What do you miss most about living in France, Ireland and Kenya?
I have not been able to travel outside the U.S. for the past two years almost, so what I miss most is obviously my friends, my family and my colleagues, the people that I'm not able to see. I also miss my high school students and I love when they send me emails, so hopefully they will read this and they will think about me — haha!
