About
I joined the University of Liverpool in 2021 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2019-2023) and as a Lecturer in French (since March 2023). I was awarded a PhD in French from the University of Edinburgh in 2017 and held several fixed-term research and/or teaching positions across the UK, including a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. I'm also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (now AdvanceHE).
My research focuses on the histories, texts, and visual cultures produced during and in the aftermath of Belgian and French colonialism. I have a broad range of research interests, from colonial and postcolonial museums to environmental history and history of science, and the connections between colonialism and the contemporary global far right.
I will be a Leverhulme Research Fellow for 2026-27 with a book project entitled "Experimental Empire: Science, Technology, and Belgian Colonialism, 1897–1958". I'm also currently running two research projects:
- 'Re-valuing Local Knowledges: Understanding Voice, Land and Power for Climate Action in Eastern DRC' (funded by a British Academy ODA Challenge-Oriented Research Grant, 2024-26).
- 'Mapping Internationalist Forms of Antifascist Solidarity: The League of Nation's Archive of Antifascist Communication in response to the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939' (which was funded by the University of Liverpool's Early Career and Returners Fund, 2024-25) with my Liverpool colleagues Dr Nicola Mathieson (International Relations) and Dr Emily Kearon-Warrilow (History).
I welcome MRes and PhD enquiries in any of those areas and also on: Francophone and/or global cities, Central African and North African literatures in French, critical theory (post- and decolonial theory, critical animal studies, ecocriticism, queer theory).
Together with Prof. Chris Pearson (University of Liverpool), Dr Rohan Deb Roy (University of Reading) and Dr Shirley Ye (University of Birmingham), I am editing the new Liverpool Studies in Environmental History book series for Liverpool University Press. For more detail on the aims and scope of the series, please have a look here.
I very much enjoy collaborating with colleagues across disciplines and (wildly) different topics and am glad to be able to do so also through my work as Environmental Co-Lead of the Centre for Health, Arts, Society and the Environment and Humanities (CHASE) and Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty Champion for the Interdisciplinary Centre for Sustainability Research (ICSR).
My research and biography overlap at certain points: I'm a first-generation university graduate and grew up in Germany and in Algeria, my father's native country (unfortunately without picking up much Arabic). I speak French, German, and English, and have started learning Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish.