Sara-Jane Vigneault

Supported by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP and the Cambridge Trust, my doctoral research intends to analyse the relationships between French civilians and French colonial soldiers from the interwar period in France until the replacement of the French colonial empire system in 1946. The questions I seek to address locate the internal ruptures of French colonial discourse on space and bodies through an analysis of French colonial soldiers’ relationships with French citizens, particularly French women of diverse social strata. In doing so, I aim to situate how relations between French citizens and French colonial soldiers demonstrated the subversion of France’s social regulations and further disrupted the French empire’s gendered, colonial, and racial boundaries while repositing French colonial soldiers as social actors in the formation of internal and external identification processes in France and its colonial space.

I previously completed my master’s degree at the University of Toronto’s Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (History) and the Collaborative Program in Jewish Studies, from which I was awarded the SSHRC and OGS scholarships. I also worked as a curator for the Montreal Holocaust Museum and participated in several projects, such as the documentary Après Coup, which focused on children of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide.