by Cyrus Schayegh, Professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Visiting professor MSH

Organise in collaboration with REPI

This conference shows how complexly actors in the late French empire (1950s) situated themselves in comparison to multiple intertwined others, foremostly the rising US empire. Underlying this complexity was the fact that both France and the United States were multi-dimensional in the eye of the French comparison-making beholder. The United States was three things at once (a nation-state, settler colony, and a rising empire) and France, four things: a polity dominated by the US empire, a nation-state, a nation-state-settler-colony one might call France-Algeria, and an empire. I study four intertwined dimensions of this story. France-as-an-empire was compared with the United States-as-an-empire through an Algerian prism. Comparisons with America as a nation-state-settler-colony structured how people thought about France-Algeria. Algerians’ nature vis-à-vis France and French policies vis-à-vis them were considered through the lens of native Americans. And the ambiguous figure of the native American reflected worries and hopes about France’s place in a US-dominated world.

Cyrus Schayegh (PhD, Columbia University, 2004) has been Professor of International History at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID) since 2017. Before, he was Associate Professor at Princeton University and Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut. His most recent books are the monograph The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard UP, 2017) and the edited volume Globalizing the U.S. Presidency: Postcolonial Views of John F. Kennedy (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is currently working on three projects. One concerns transimperial history, and includes an introductory book to that field and two edited volumes resulting from a conference he organized at IHEID in spring 2022. Another project is a series of article-length case studies on modern global Middle Eastern history and a related collection of primary sources that will be published at the open-access Wilson Center Digital Archive. He is editing that collection. (A first collection―he built and translated himself.) Finally, a third project involves editing The Cambridge Companion to the Cold War in the Middle East and North Africa.

Friday 7th June 2024, 11.30am - 1.30pm

Salle Gemerek
Institut d'Études Européennes (IEE)
Avenue F. Roosevelt 39
1000 Bruxelles

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