Stephanie Ponsavady

Stéphanie Ponsavady's research focuses on the development of transportation systems, with special attention given to roads and the automobile, in the French Colonial Empire. Her first book, Cultural and Literary Representations of the Automobile in French Indochina: A Colonial Roadshow (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) examines the history of automobility in French Indochina at the turn of the twentieth century, analyzing archival material and French and Vietnamese literature to critically assess French colonialism. Broadening her research chronologically and geographically, her current project, An Empire of Drivers, questions the congruence and interplay of France’s automobile culture and colonial history by examining the specifics of the automobile as social and cultural object. She contributed to an episode of the BBC