Emmanuelle Saada

Research interests: French colonialism and imperialism; immigration; racial formations and racism in Europe; the history of citizenship; legal history; historiography and the epistemology of the social sciences.

Emmanuelle Saada is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French colonialism and imperialism. She is a Professor in the Department of French, with an affiliation in the Department of History, where she supervises PhD dissertations on French and European colonialism and imperialism.

Saada’s most recent book, Histoires et colonisations. Des récits de la conquête aux héritages postcoloniaux (Gallimard, 2026), examines how historians have understood, described, and debated colonization over the past two centuries, with particular attention to transformations in the field since the 1990s. Rather than organizing the history of colonization by empire or region, the book approaches it through the practices that made colonial power possible: discovering and conquering, knowing, dominating, exploiting, governing, and decolonizing. Drawing on cases from five continents, it explores enduring debates over conquest, violence, slavery, capitalism, knowledge, the relationship between colonialism and modernity, and colonial legacies. Across these debates, Saada traces historians’ assumptions about temporality, chronology, rupture and continuity, as well as power and agency, showing how these assumptions shape competing interpretations of colonial history. At the heart of the book is a fundamental tension between fully acknowledging the violence and destructive effects of colonization and recognizing the capacity of colonized peoples to make their own history and to counter those effects, both through political action and through their own narratives.

Saada’s first book, Les enfants de la colonie. Les métis de l’empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté (La Découverte, 2007; translated as Empire’s Children. Race, Filiation and Citizenship in the French Colonies, University of Chicago Press, 2012), examined how the existence of métis children—children born of European and Indigenous parents in the French Empire—challenged the racial and legal boundaries on which colonial rule depended. The book argued that, throughout the empire, the “métis question” was a crucial site where the French colonial state redefined the relationship among race, filiation, and citizenship. It focused in particular on the origins and effects of the 1928 decree concerning people of mixed parentage in French Indochina, which was subsequently adapted in most French colonies. The decree introduced racial criteria into French citizenship, revealing how French nationality, both in the colonies and in France, was shaped through judgments about ancestry, culture, education, social belonging, and ultimately race.

Saada has also worked on immigration law and participated in a collective research project on the administrative and legal treatment of undocumented migrants in France, published in Le recours à la justice administrative (with Jean-Gabriel Contamin, Alexis Spire, and Katia Weidenfeld; La Documentation française, 2008). She has published numerous articles and chapters on colonial law, violence, citizenship, the history of race and racial regimes in Europe, and colonial reparations. 

At Columbia, Saada teaches in the Core Curriculum, including Contemporary Civilization and Colonization/Decolonization, as well as undergraduate courses on French history and European colonialism. In recent years, she developed, with an attorney specializing in immigration law, a new undergraduate course, “Asylum/Asile,” in which students work with Francophone asylum seekers in New York City. She also teaches graduate seminars on French imperialism, law and violence in modern European empires, reparations, and the histories of racial regimes in Europe.

Saada received the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award in 2012 and was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 2017.

Selected Publications 

Books

Histoires et colonisations. Des récits de la conquête aux héritages postcoloniaux (Paris: Gallimard, 2026) https://www.gallimard.fr/catalogue/histoires-et-colonisations/9782070350087

Empire’s Children. Race, Filiation and Citizenship in the French Colonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) (translation of Les enfants de la colonie. Les métis de l’empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté, Paris: La Découverte, 2007) https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo9637538.html

Le recours à la justice administrative, with Jean-Gabriel Contamin, Alexis Spire, and Katia Weidenfeld (Paris: La Documentation française, 2008) https://documentation.insp.gouv.fr/insp/doc/SYRACUSE/136161/le-recours-a-la-justice-administrative-pratiques-des-usagers-et-usages-des-institutions-mission-de-r?_lg=fr-FR

Book Chapters

« Racialisation », in Arthur Asseraf, Guillaume Blanc, Yala Kisukidi, Mélanie Lamotte and Pierre Singaravélou, Colonisations. Notre histoire (Paris : Le Seuil, 2024) https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/colonisations-pierre-singaravelou/9782021494150

“Race and Empire,” in Jeremy Jennings and Michael Moriarty (eds.), The Cambridge History of French Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-french-thought/D41470EECCC370BD8A70E03BABBDB279

“The Longue Durée of French Decolonization,” in Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the End of Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/28076

“Sociability in the Imperial Republic,” in Margrit Pernau and Helge Jordheim and al., Civilizing Emotions. Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe, 1870-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civilizing-emotions-9780198745532?cc=fr&lang=en&

Articles

« La race comme catégorie d’analyse dans les sciences sociales françaises. Retour sur une dispute », Sensibilités, Histoire, Critique & Sciences sociales, 13, 1, 2024. https://anamosa.fr/livre/race-lombre-portee/

« Avant de prendre place sous la véranda coloniale », Critique, 838, 2017. https://www.leseditionsdeminuit.fr/livre-Critique_n%C2%B0838_Ru%C3%A9es_sur_le_monde-3226-1-1-0-1.html

« Nationalité et citoyenneté en situation coloniale et post-coloniale », Pouvoirs, 160, 2017. https://revue-pouvoirs.fr/nationalite-et-citoyennete-en/

« La loi, le droit et l’indigène », Droits, 43, 2006. https://www.puf.com/droits-2006-ndeg-43