Mélanie Lamotte

Prof. Mélanie Lamotte is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of History and French. Before joining UT, she was a tenure-track Assistant Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Junior Professor of Africana Studies and French at Tulane University, and a Research Fellow in History (2021-22) at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 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, India and Isle Bourbon, in the South-West Indian Ocean. Her monograph, forthcoming at Harvard University Press and titled Making Race: Policy, Sex, and Social Order in the Early French Atlantic and Indian Oceans, is the first pan-imperial study of race in the French colonial empire. At Harvard, Prof. Lamotte worked on a new research project on the daily lives of enslaved people in the 17th- and 18th-century French Atlantic and Indian Oceans, titled Freedom in Chains: Daily Lives of the Enslaved in the Early French Empire. She has published a co-edited volume with Pierre Singaravélou, titled Colonisations : Notre Histoire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2023), which is a collection of texts written by over 250 historians, literary scholars, philosophers and anthropologists, including major figures in the field, such as Patrick Chamoiseau and Achille Mbembe. Prof. Lamotte has also written peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on color prejudice in the French Caribbean, the archives available to historians of French Louisiana, the unification of racial policies across the French Atlantic and Indian Ocean, the origins of the French empire, and on transoceanic circulations and the formation of the French empire. Her work has been supported by the Radcliffe Institute, 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.