Dr. Judith DeGroat

I am by training and inclination an historian of France and my scholarship focuses on the multiple ways that society and individuals construct and contest identity through notions of gender, class, race and ethnicity. I have published articles on women in the Paris trades in the mid- nineteenth century who fought for economic and political rights to work, feed their families and defend their trades. I have also had the chance to develop my interest in and publish on cultural history, including the contemporary debate on national identity in France as it concerns immigration and gender and to begin a new area of research: a cultural biography of Pauline Roland, a socialist feminist who spent the last year of her life (1856) as a political exile in Algeria. Both of those projects have led to an interest in French colonial history; I will join the executive board of the international society this summer in Paris where I participate in a roundtable on race, gender and colonialism (www.frenchcolonial.org). I do my best to stay up-to-date on historical scholarship as an area editor for the on-line review journal H-France (www.h-france.net/reviews).