Alice Conklin on Learning to Become a Historian.

Alice L. Conklin is Professor of History at Ohio State University. She is a cultural, political, and intellectual historian of Modern France and its Empire with a focus on the twentieth century. Her most recent book is In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Cornell, 2013), which won the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the Senior Book Prize from the Ohio Academy of History. An illustrated French edition of the book, Exposer l’humanité: race, ethnologie et empire en France, 1850-1950 (Editions scientifiques du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle) appeared in 2015. She is also the author of A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford University Press, 1997), which won the Berkshire Prize for Best Book by a Woman. She co-authored France and Its Empire since 1870, with Sarah Fishman and Robert Zaretsky (Oxford, 2nd ed., 2014) and European Imperialism, 1830-1930: Climax and Contradictions, with Ian Christopher Fletcher (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Her articles have appeared in such peer-reviewed journals as the American Historical Review, French Historical Studies, Osiris, French Politics, Culture and Society, and Cahiers d’études africaines, She taught at the University of Rochester for thirteen years before moving to OSU in 2004 and has received several national and international awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a German Marshall Fund Fellowship and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship. In 2016, she was one of six OSU faculty to receive a Distinguished Scholar Award.

She is currently working on a transnational history of French antiracism between 1945 and 1965, when ideals for cooperation among a broad coalition of scholars and activists around the world collided with unforeseen political realignments triggered by the Cold War. 

She has advised several doctorates and undergraduate theses to completion and is currently accepting graduate students (see CV for details).

Books:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exposer l’humanité: race, ethnologie et empire en France, 1850-1950 (Editions scientifiques du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, 2015)

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In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Cornell, 2013)

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A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford University Press, 1997) 

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France and Its Empire since 1870, with Sarah Fishman and Robert Zaretsky (Oxford, 2nd ed., 2014) 

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European Imperialism, 1830-1930: Climax and Contradictions, with Ian Christopher Fletcher (Houghton Mifflin, 1998)