Teaching Fellows

Charles Fawell is a social and cultural historian of 19th and 20th-century Europe specializing in France and the French Empire. During the 2022-23 academic year, he will be a Teaching Fellow in the Department of History and the College.

His research traces how new modes of mobility shaped European imperialism and sparked contests between states, corporations, and mobile subjects over how to govern globalization. He is now revising his dissertation into a book manuscript, In-between Empires: Steamship Highways of the French Indo-Pacific (1830-1940). Based on two years of archival research in France, the U.K., and Vietnam, the project juxtaposes the everyday histories of cramped steamships against the interimperial politics of a vast maritime corridor connecting Europe, Africa, and Asia via the Suez Canal. Sea corridors connected metropoles and colonies through infrastructures of imperial power: steamships, coal depots, telegraph cables, quarantine stations, and more. In-between Empires argues that these spaces were not merely “tools of empire,” however, but rather contested borderlands where the politics of mobility – from categorizing people in motion and controlling a coal-heaving workforce to establishing responsibility for disease control and legal jurisdiction – both stitched empire together and pulled it apart at the seams.

Learn more about Fawell here.