Hannah Morand

Hannah Morand is a PhD candidate in History and Early Modern Studies at Yale University, where she studies the French salt tax (Gabelle) as a socio-technical system that materialised state power through physical infrastructure, enforcement mechanisms, and administrative practices. Her research explores the intersection of tax policy, fiscal architecture, and social resistance in eighteenth-century France. She is particularly attentive to how taxation functioned as an instrument of social and territorial control. A key part of this work studies how metropolitan tax resistance became entangled with colonial labour systems and imperial governance.
 

Her interest in the relationship between material culture and political authority began with her MA thesis at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, where she studied Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s pre-revolutionary designs for an ideal industrial city in Franche-Comté. That work explored how revolutionary architecture embodied tensions between ancien régime patronage and revolutionary aspirations.

Hannah’s research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Canada Graduate Master’s Scholarship and Canada Graduate Doctoral Fellowship). She has presented papers at the Society for French Historical Studies, World Economic History Congress, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Scientiae and the Society of Architectural Historians, among other conferences, and was awarded the Natalie Zemon Davis Prize for best graduate student paper at the 2026 SFHS annual conference.

Department: History