Natalya Benkhaled-Vince
Sanderson Tutorial Fellow in Modern History; Associate Professor of the History of Modern France and the Francophone World
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Contact information
Teaching
Whilst trained as a historian, in the course of my research and teaching, I鈥檝e been fortunate to work with artists, filmmakers, anthropologists, linguists, political scientists and sociologists. I鈥檓 really interested in how concepts and methodologies drawn from these disciplines can inform and enhance historical research, and this is one reason why I really enjoy teaching Approaches to History and Disciplines of History to our undergraduates.
I also teach undergraduate survey courses on European and World/Global History in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, engaging in themes ranging across economic change, class formation, race, women鈥檚 and gender history, nationalism and internationalism, colonisation and decolonisation and politics and art. I teach on the Special Subject 鈥楩rance from the Popular Front to the Liberation, 1936-1944′. I supervise undergraduate theses and bridge essays on topics across colonial and post-colonial history, particularly in relation to the French empire and twentieth-century French and Maghribi politics, culture and society.
I teach Theory and Methods on the MSt in History and I have supervised doctoral research on the post-colonial politics of oil, trade and infrastructure, language policy, cultural production and memory. I welcome research student enquiries on topics related to colonial or post-colonial histories in the (former) French empire, including metropolitan France, as well as comparative and connected studies with other (former) empires.
Research
I鈥檓 a historian of the French empire, decolonisation and post-colonial histories in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I have particular interests in global histories of decolonisation, oral history, memory and women鈥檚 and gender history. One of the key themes running through my research is how ordinary people shape, as well as resist, seismic political events and social and cultural shifts. This has led me to projects on women veterans of the Algerian War of Independence, West African soldiers in the French army, wartime sexual violence in Algeria and Indonesia 鈥� and my current project, on Algerian students, state-building and social mobility during the Third Worldist era of the 1960s and 1970s.
I鈥檓 increasingly focused on creative, multidisciplinary and widely accessible approaches to producing and disseminating research. This includes leading the project 鈥楪eneration Independence鈥�, an online series of trilingual documentary shorts, with an accompanying series of artworks, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I enjoy working collaboratively with colleagues across the world, and have led or been part of projects with the University of Algiers, the University of Dakar, the Institut d鈥檋istoire du temps pr茅sent (Paris) and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.
Selected Publications
Books
The Algerian War, The Algerian Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) See:
Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954-2012 (Manchester University Press, 2015). Winner of the Women鈥檚 History Network Book Prize. See:
Articles and chapters (selected)
鈥楾he places, traces and politics of rape in the Indonesian and Algerian Wars鈥� co-authored with Stef Scagliola, Khedidja Adel and Galuh Ambar, in Thijs Brocades Zaalberg and Bart Luttikhuis (eds), Empire鈥檚 Violent End: Comparing Dutch, British and French Wars of Decolonisation, 1945-1962 (Cornell University Press, 2022) See (free e-book):
鈥榃omen in Northern African History鈥�, co-authored with Kmar Bendana and Fadma A茂t Mous, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2020) See:
鈥楲ooking for 鈥渢he woman question鈥� in Algeria and Tunisia: ideas, political languages and female actors on the eve and in the aftermath of national independence鈥� in Max D. Weiss & Jens Hanssen (eds.) Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2018) See:
鈥楶erforming Algerianness: the national and transnational construction of Algeria鈥檚 鈥渃ulture wars鈥濃��, co-authored with Walid Benkhaled, in Patrick Crowley (ed.) Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism, 1988-2015 (Liverpool University Press, 2017)
鈥楾ransgressing Boundaries: gender, race, religion and 鈥淔ran莽aises musulmanes鈥� during the Algerian War of Independence鈥�, French Historical Studies, 33:1 (2010). Most-read article in French Historical Studies in 2016 and 2017. See: