Dr. Marker’s research and teaching interests are in imperial and postcolonial Europe, francophone Africa, race, religion, youth, and global history. Her recent book, Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Cornell, 2022), explores how public and private programs to promote solidarity between French and African youth collided with transnational efforts to make young people in Western Europe feel European after World War II. Based on several years of archival research in France, Senegal, Italy and Belgium, Black France, White Europe locates these competing generational projects at the center of the entangled history of decolonization and European integration. 

She is currently working on a personal family history that explores the relationship between reparations, transnational European identity, and the inter-generational transfer of wealth, with a view toward reframing contemporary European debates about reparations for slavery and colonialism. In 2023-2024, Dr. Marker is developing this project as a faculty fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis [RCHA], whose current seminar theme is ‘Repairing the Past.’ 

In addition to her research and teaching, Dr. Marker works on initiatives for social justice and equity in the academy. A co-founder of the Race and Pedagogy Working Group at the University of Chicago (2015), she has organized workshops and community classes on power, privilege, and inclusive teaching. In 2023-24, Dr. Marker is serving as president of the Camden Chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. She’s also a member of the Graduate Faculty in History at Rutgers-New Brunswick, the Executive Committee of Rutgers’ Center for African Studies, and the Faculty Advisory Board of Rutgers’ Center for European Studies.

Dr. Marker is currently the president of the Western Society for French History.

~PUBLICATIONS~

Book

WINNER: George Louis Beer Prize, American Historical Association

HONORABLE MENTION: David H. Pinkney Prize, Society for French Historical Studies

HONORABLE MENTION: Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize, French Colonial History Society

BOOK FORUM in Tocqueville 21 (December 2022)

Reviewed in Journal of Social History (2023), Francia-Recensio (2023), and H-Soz-Kult (2023)

Articles

“Notes on Sources: Leo Marker,” Journal of the Western Society of French History 49 (2023) 

“African Youth on the Move in Postwar Greater France: Experiential Knowledge and Decolonial Politics at the End of Empire,” Know: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 3(2) Fall 2019

AHR Conversation: Each Generation Writes Its Own History of Generations, The American Historical Review 123, Issue 5 (December 2018)

“Obscuring Race: Franco-African Conversations about Colonial Reform and Racism After World War II and the Making of Colorblind France,” French Politics, Culture & Society 33(3) (Winter 2015)

Special Issues

Race, Racism and the Study of France and the Francophone World Today: Part III, H-France Salon 13(18) (2021) [edited with Christy Pichichero]

Race, Racism and the Study of France and the Francophone World Today: Part II, H-France Salon 12(1) (2020) [edited with Christy Pichichero]  

Race, Racism and the Study of France and the Francophone World Today: Part I, H-France Salon 11(2) (2019) [edited with Christy Pichichero]

Reviews

Sarah Ann Frank, Hostages of Empire: Colonial Prisoners of War in Vichy France, Cultural History 12:2 2023, 272-274

Damiano Matasci et al., Repenser “la mission civilisatrice”: L’éducation dans le monde colonial et postcolonial au XXe siècle, Revue suisse d’histoire, 72(3) 2022, 479-482.

Stephen L. Harp, The Riveria Exposed: An Ecohistory of Postwar Tourism and North African Labor, Journal of Social History, August 19, 2022.

J.P. Daughton, “The ‘Pacha Affair’ Reconsidered: Violence and Colonial Rule in Interwar French Equatorial Africa,” H-Diplo Article Review 991, October 27, 2020.

Kristen Stromberg Childers, Seeking Imperialism’s Embrace: National Identity, Decolonization and Assimilation in the French Caribbean, H-France Forum, Vol 12, Issue 4, no 3 (2017).

Andrew W.M. Smith and Chris Jeppesen, eds. Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect? H-France Review, Volume 17 (2017) no 205.

 

~ UNDERGRADUATE COURSES~                                          ~ GRADUATE COURSES~

Western Civilization III                                                                  Global Nineteenth Century

France, Africa and the Caribbean                                                 Genocide in Global History

France and Its Empire                                                                  Empire & Decolonization

European History on Film                                                             The Craft of History

Contemporary Europe

Imperialism

Racism and Antiracism in Europe since 1945