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Shanti.M.Singham@williams.edu Growing up on the U.W.I. campus in Jamaica during the tumultuous yet promising years of independence, the Rodney crisis, and Michael Manley's brave attempt to chart a third path for the Caribbean, Shanti Singham fell in love with history reading C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins and Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery. Moving to the United States for her undergraduate and graduate education in the 1970's, her interests shifted, both because of fabulous teachers at Swarthmore and Princeton and because of the absence of Caribbean and Diaspora Studies during those years, to French and European history. Maintaining an interest in social protest movements, Singham's Ph.D. focused on radical French activists – female and male - in the pre-revolutionary era, the activities of whom she uncovered by working in French police archives and reading the illegal pamphlets they produced. Coming to Williams College as a Bolin Fellow in 1987, Singham has benefitted from the rich teaching culture here to return to her Caribbean roots, and to focus on the kind of transatlantic history she learned from James, Williams, and Rodney. Besides teaching a wide array of world history courses, and publishing in the areas of the Haitian Revolution and the history of Muslim-French relations, Singham has acted as faculty sponsor for SOCA (Students of Caribbean Ancestry), has organized teach-ins against the Iraq War, has taken students to work in New Hampshire on presidential campaigns, and has been active in Africana Studies. She is currently Chair of Africana Studies (2009-). "From Cosmopolitan Anti-Colonialism to Liberal Imperialism: French Intellectuals and North Africa in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries," Forthcoming, Festschrift celebrating the work of Robert Darnton "France, Algeria, Iraq:Teaching and Activism in a Time of War," http://historiansagainstwar.org/hawconf/2006/singham.doc, 2006 "Imbued With Patriotism: The Maupeou Crisis and the Politicization of the Mémoires secrets," in The Mémoires secrets and the Secrets of the Enlightenment, Voltaire Foundation, History of the Periodical Press series, ed. Bernadette Fort and Jeremy Popkin, Oxford University Press, Fall, 1998 "Betwixt Cattle and Men: Jews, Blacks and Women and the Declaration of the Rights of Man," in The French Idea of Freedom. The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley, Stanford University Press, 1994 "Vox populi, vox dei: les jansénistes pendant la révolution Maupeou," ("The Voice of the People is the Voice of God: Jansenist activists during the Maupeou Revolution,") in Jansénisme et Révolution. Actes du colloque de Versailles tenu au Palais des congrès les 13 et 14 octobre 1989, réunis par Catherine Maire, Paris, 1990 Ph. D., Princeton University, Department of History, June 1991; Dissertation:"'A Conspiracy of Twenty Million Frenchmen': Public Opinion, Patriotism, and the Assault on Absolutism During the Maupeou Years, 1770-1775," currently being revised as a book manuscript, entitled Rehearsal for Revolution. The Maupeou Crisis and the Making of Political Consciousness in France, 1771-1774 Muslims & Africans in Europe; Black France & Diaspora Studies; Racism and the Enlightenment; the French and Haitian Revolutions. Stephanie Brown, '89, William Wordsworth: politics and poetics, 1790-1805 [Co-advisor] Chair, Africana Studies back to Faculty main page |
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