Personal Biography

I was born and raised in France and educated in both France and Canada. During my academic career I also held visiting positions in the United States and France. Australia became my home for over two decades, with Sydney being the place where I put down deep roots, raised my two sons, and developed a passion for Australian rules football. My professional career took me to the University of Sydney for four years and then to the University of New South Wales. In 2023, I was appointed British Academy Global Professor of History at Oxford. As the daughter of migrants and a migrant myself, the word 'global' in my title has deep personal resonance.

Research and Teaching

My main interest as a historian revolves around the movement and exchange of political and legal ideas and practices in imperial contexts. I have researched and written about imperial ideologies, Indigenous claims against dispossession and confiscation of sovereignty, and the role of treaty-making in both facilitating imperial expansion and granting Indigenous peoples leverage against the colonial state. In my current project, I aim to challenge the argument that Indigenous peoples had no legalities but only customs, or that their legalities were so distinct that they defy proper description. I am examining the political and legal negotiations between Indigenous and European polities in the Americas, Africa and the Pacific from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and the consequences of these dialogues for the formation of international law.

Publications

‘What is a Colonial Treaty? Questioning the Visible and the Invisible in European and non-European Legal Negotiations’, Comparative Legal History, vol. 10 (2022), no. 2, 137-171.

'Emancipation within Empire: An Algerian Alternative during the Decolonisation Era’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 88 (Autumn 2019), 153-179.

Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541-1954 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Native claims: Indigenous law against Empire, 1500-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012; paperback, 2014).