The Intimacies of Empire in French and Francophone Worlds

This project seeks to revitalize study of the intimate as a critical site for the humanistic study of empire and its postcolonial legacies. Hosting the annual meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society will bring scholars from around the world to Charlottesville to reconsider the ways that not only sexuality and reproduction, but also spaces and relationships of labor, politics, war, and artistic creation contributed to the regulation of bodies and sentiments in the French colonial empire and postcolonial Francophone worlds. Participants will present cutting-edge research, as well as discuss pedagogy and public engagement around these questions in the interdisciplinary field of French and Francophone studies.