CMES Colloquium: Colonialism, Violence, and Words: France and the Algerian Name ca. 1900

Ben Brower is a Professor of History at The University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the history of northwestern Africa, Algeria, and France, with a focus on violence and colonialism. His most recent book, The Colonization of Names: Symbolic Violence and France's Occupation of Algeria (Columbia University Press, 2025), examines language, power, and identity in nineteenth-century Algeria. It received the French Colonial Historical Society’s Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize. His first book, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France's Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (Columbia University Press, 2009), won the Society for French Historical Studies’ Pinkney Prize and the Albert Hourani Award and has been translated into Arabic.