Mélanie Aimée Marie Lamotte

Mélanie Lamotte is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. She received her PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, and was subsequently a fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Program at Stanford University. She is a historian of race, colonialism, and slavery in the early modern period. Her work focuses on the French colonial world, with an emphasis on Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, French Louisiana, Senegal, and Isle Bourbon, in the southwestern Indian Ocean. Her first book, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2026), is a richly detailed transoceanic history of the early French Empire. It illuminates how the empire became bound by a common legal culture of race—as well as how enslaved and free people critically shaped the making and unmaking of the French colonies. Prof. Lamotte is now working on a second book project, Inner Lives of the Enslaved in the Early French World, which examines the everyday domestic, social, and economic experiences of enslaved people across the French Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on interdisciplinary methodologies, the project advances a pan-imperial “history from below.” The last chapters of the book trace the history of Lamotte’s own Afro-Caribbean family from the pre-Revolutionary era to the present, engaging questions of memory and legacy through oral history and archival sources. Lamotte has published a co-edited volume with Pierre Singaravélou, titled Colonisations: Notre Histoire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2023), which has been acclaimed by many major journals and newspapers in France, the UK, the United States, and Canada, including H-France, French Studies, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Canadian Historical Review, the London Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro, L’Obs, Libération, Philosophie Magazine, and Télérama. Prof. Lamotte has written award-winning articles and book chapters on color prejudice in the French Caribbean, the archives available to historians of French Louisiana, the origins of the French empire, the standardization of early modern French colonial policies, and intimacies beyond sex in the French Atlantic and Indian Oceans, for peer-reviewed journals like the William and Mary Quarterly, French Politics, Culture, & Society, and Collections. Her work has been supported by the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the Mellon Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, the Library of Congress, the Center for History and Economics at Harvard and Cambridge, the Newton Trust, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Humanities Research Center of the Australian National University.