Research
Arthur Asseraf is the CRASSH/SCAS/ProFutura Fellow 2021 – 2024. He will be at CRASSH during the first two years of his Fellowship, spending the final year at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Sweden. He was also a Cambridge Early Career Fellow at CRASSH in Lent Term 2021.
While at CRASSH, I will be working on a new project on the history of race in late 20th century France. The central question of this project is: what happens to racial categories when the state denies that race exists? I will examine how racial difference could be affirmed, denied, or hinted at in France between 1958 and 1995, focusing on a local study of a town in Southern France. From a local understanding in the specific context of Fifth Republic France, this study will contribute to a global history of race in the post-war period. Rather than affirming that race disappeared or simply continued under new guises, I will trace how its epistemic basis shifted by looking at when, where, how, and by whom race could be articulated by focusing on the intersection of administrative practice, social science research and media.
About
Dr Arthur Asseraf is a University Lecturer in the Faculty of History and a fellow of Pembroke College. He is a historian of modern North Africa, France and the Mediterranean, with particular interests in histories of information, race, and colonialism. Born and raised in Paris, he completed his DPhil in Oxford where he was Examination Fellow at All Souls College. His first book, Electric News in Colonial Algeria(2019), which won the Middle East Studies Book Prize, explored the globalisation of information across a deeply divided settler society.
