Rate My Professor Emmanuelle Saada

Emmanuelle Saada is Professor of French and History at Columbia University, serving as Chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies. She joined Columbia's Department of French and Romance Philology in 2006. Prior to that, she was a faculty member at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) since 2003 and worked from 1997 to 2003 as Assistant Director and then faculty fellow at the Institute of French Studies at New York University. Saada received her academic training in France at the École normale supérieure (Fontenay-Saint Cloud) in history and sociology, followed by a PhD in History from EHESS in 2001. Her research and teaching focus on the history of the French empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a specific interest in law, citizenship, legal cultures, and the historical sociology of colonization. She also explores the history of French social thought, families in colonial contexts, and the history and sociology of immigration and colonization.

Saada is the author of Les enfants de la colonie: les métis de l'Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté (La Découverte, 2007), which received the Auguste Pavie Prize and was a finalist for the Jean Zay Prize, and its English translation Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies (University of Chicago Press, 2012), awarded the Herbert Feis Award for the best book in international history by the American Historical Association, the Chercheur sédentaire Prize of the Fondation des Sciences Humaines, and the Louis Marin Prize of the Société française d’histoire du droit. Her scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Ford Foundation. She has published numerous articles on colonial law, culture, politics, and reflections on the French social sciences, including contributions to Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe (Oxford University Press, 2015). Currently, Saada is completing a historiographical book on French and European colonization conceived as a history of the present and a project on law and violence in Algeria and France during the nineteenth century. She serves on the editorial board of Romanic Review and was honored with the insignia of the Order of Arts and Letters by France.