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Mary Lewis Appointed Professor of History at Harvard
Cambridge, Mass. - July 9, 2010 - Mary Lewis, a historian of modern France whose work has shed new light on French immigration and imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, has been named professor of history at Harvard University.
Lewis was previously John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard, where she has been a member of the faculty since 2002.
"Professor Lewis' work is grounded in exhaustive research, sophisticated methodology, and nuanced argumentation," says Stephen Kosslyn, dean of social science in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "She is the rare historian who can write authoritatively on both France and the French empire, and her research addresses issues that remain central to France today: immigration, citizenship, rights, and the power of the state. Last but not least, our students have benefited greatly from her skill as a wide-ranging teacher, curricular innovator, and dedicated mentor."
Lewis has won widespread praise for her first book, The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2007), a pioneering study of a guest worker program that arose in France following World War I. Based on research in a dozen archives and a systematic comparison of migrant records in Lyons and Marseilles, the book demonstrates how migrant rights evolved from a legally prescribed system of temporary labor to a local, selective incorporation of certain migrant families as permanent residents. Migrants' rights initially "thickened," in Lewis' terms, due to local action by individual migrants and policymakers. These variable rights then "thinned" again, she writes, with the approach of World War II.
Lewis demonstrates that the boundary between French citizens and outsiders in the early decades of the 20th century was more malleable than previously believed. She goes beyond a focus on central government policy to examine migrants' local interactions, from workplaces and neighborhoods to police stations and soup kitchens, undermining the common vision of France as a highly centralized nation. The Boundaries of the Republic was a co-winner of the Law and Society Association's James Willard Hurst Prize for the year's best work in sociolegal history, and will be translated this year into a French edition.
Lewis is now working on a second book titled Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia. Drawing upon 11 archives in four nations, she uses the case of the little-studied French protectorate in Tunisia to study how imperial rivalry affected French colonial governance from the 1880s to the 1930s. Lewis finds that individual Tunisians successfully exploited these rivalries to claim rights and privileges related to administration of justice, taxation, property acquisition and transmission, and burial rites. The success of such individual claims forced the French to move from their preferred strategy of indirect rule to a form of greater direct rule and explicit colonialism.
Lewis received her B.A. in international relations and French from the University of California, Davis, in 1991, followed by an M.A. and Ph.D. in history and French studies from New York University in 1995 and 2000, respectively. She was a Woodrow Wilson Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Smith College from 2000 to 2002 and was named assistant professor of history at Harvard in 2002, becoming John L. Loeb Associate Professor in 2006.
Lewis has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright Program to support her research. She has been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals French Politics, Culture and Society and Actes de l'Histoire de l'Immigration.
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