Mélanie Aimée Marie Lamotte

Prof. Mélanie Lamotte is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of History. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge, before transferring to 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 in the Caribbean, French Louisiana, Senegal, and Isle Bourbon, in the South-West Indian Ocean. The title of her monograph, forthcoming at Harvard University Press is Empire Unseen: A Transoceanic Story of Sex, Race, and Labor in the Early French World. Prof. Lamotte is also working on a new research project on the daily lives of the enslaved in the 17th- and 18th-century French Atlantic and Indian Oceans. She 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, including Le Monde, Le Figaro, L’Obs, Libération, Alternatives Economiques, Philosophie Magazine, En attendant Nadeau, La Nouvelle République, Télérama, La Croix and Histoire Politique. Prof. Lamotte has written 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, and on transoceanic circulations and the standardization of early modern French colonial policies for journals like the William and Mary Quarterly 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 Australia National University.