My first book, Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration, Race, and the Welfare State in France, 1954-1981 examines the entangled histories of three threads of decolonization: the French welfare state, family migration from Algeria, and the French social workers who mediated between the state and their Algerian clients. I explore the dynamic, conflicting, and often messy way these threads intertwined over the course of the Algerian War to reveal their belated unravelling more than a decade after Algerian independence. The welfare state's story was not merely one of rise and fall but of winnowing services to "deserving" clients. Defunding social services--long associated with the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and beyond--has a much longer story defined by exacting controls on colonial citiens and migrants of newly independent countries. By retelling the history of the welfare state through the prism of decolonization, I argue that the “golden age” of welfare was only made so through the exclusion of Algerian workers and their families. I have published a portion of this research as “Defining Family, Delimiting Belonging: Algerian Migration after the End of Empire,” which appeared in a special issue of Gender & History in fall 2019. 

I am also starting two new projects. As a Bingham Faculty Fellow at the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society, I developed the outline of a microhistory of the so-called Perrou affair, in which the relatively anonymous Armand Perrou illegally placed twenty-five Algerian children up for "adoption" during the Algerian War. This study, born from a chance encounter in the archives in the wake of revelations about the United States's own child separation policies, will consider the relationship between colonialism, conceptions of the stable family, and the politics of historical methods. The second project is a longer-term study on family planning in France from the postwar to the present. This project grows from research and interests that emerged from my first project. A portion of this research appeared in an edited volume as "Inessential Labor: Reproduction, Work, and Algerian Family Migration after Independence."