Modern Europe Colloquium: Megan Brown
The Modern Europe Colloquium presents Megan Brown, Associate Professor, Swarthmore College, on “The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community.”
As European officials negotiated the treaty that would found the precursor to today’s European Union, French diplomats had more than integration on their minds. Algeria, considered the crown jewel of the French empire, was embroiled in a war of independence. Grasping for a way to maintain their authority in Algeria, these French officials turned to integrated Europe as a tool, even a weapon, in their war against anti-imperial nationalists. As a result, through diplomatic wrangling, Algeria found itself named in the foundational document of the European Economic Community, signed in 1957. How could Algeria be named as a part of the EEC? What would this mean after Algeria’s independence? And how does the first “exit” from integrated Europe change our understanding Europe’s boundaries, the nature of decolonization, and the meaning of European citizenship?
Location: HQ (Humanities Quadrangle), Rm 107, 320 York St.
The Modern Europe Colloquium is generously sponsored by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; the European Studies Council of the Yale MacMillan Center
Bio: Megan Brown is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Swarthmore College, with a focus on 20th-century France, European integration, and empire. She is the author of “The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community” (Harvard, 2022). Her teaching and research interests include post-World War II politics, decolonization, the history of France and Algeria, and questions of citizenship. She received her PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Professor Brown received her PhD in History from the Graduate Center, CUNY. At Swarthmore, she teaches surveys of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries and a variety of courses on topics including postwar Western Europe, the French Revolution, nationalism, and settler colonialism. She is interested in engaging students in the digital humanities, including projects like Holidays in the Empire for her upper-division course on tourism. Professor Brown is a former Fulbright Scholar to France and her writing has been published in Modern & Contemporary France and French Politics, Culture & Society.
Beyond her work on empire and European integration, Professor Brown is also engaged in research about both automobile tourism and a French scandal known as les Ballets roses.