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Contact Info: Department of History Tufts University East Hall, room 106 Medford, MA 02155 617.627.2312 Email Prof. Foster Office Hours: Mon 5:30-6:30 Tue 4:00-5:00

Biography

I specialize in the history of modern France and the French Empire, though I also enjoy teaching courses in European history more broadly. My current manuscript explores the intersections between religion and empire in French West Africa. Based on archival research in France, Senegal, and Italy, it examines the relationships between French Catholic missionaries, French colonial administrators, and Muslim, Christian, and animist Africans in colonial Senegal between 1880 and 1940. I first became interested in the relationship between conquest, colonial rule, and religion when I spent three summers during college living and working on the Blackfeet Reservation in northern Montana. Though I went on to study a very different part of the world, I find myself continually posing the same questions that I encountered there. Did religious missionaries consider themselves allies of colonial rulers and/or advocates of colonized peoples? How did colonial authorities treat missionaries and their converts? How did colonized peoples receive religious proselytism in a context of conquest and societal change? I have also recently been thinking about the “decolonization” of religious institutions in Africa; i.e., how and when churches became indigenous institutions and ceased to be missionary outposts. I have just completed an essay on this topic for an edited collection on French missionaries. In my next book-length project, I plan to investigate the administration of justice in French West Africa, in order to examine how French administrators and their African representatives defined and applied customary law in regions of mixed ethnic and confessional communities.

I presently offer courses on modern France and the French Empire, the French Revolution, the First World War, and modern Europe. I hope to develop courses on the relationship between France and Africa and comparative colonial topics in the near future. I also currently serve as the Treasurer of the French Colonial Historical Society.

Education