Sara-Jane Vigneault

I am a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Dr. Arthur Asseraf. Supported by the AHRC and the Cambridge Trust Scholarships, my doctoral project focuses on intimate relationships between French colonised men and European civilians in France and Germany (1914-1950). The presence of racialised soldiers and workers on European soil offered unprecedented possibilities to cross the intimate frontiers of the empire. In response, French authorities sought what I call ‘containment projects’ through biopolitical governance policies to control racialised men’s proximity with European women and protect imperial rule. Probing the intimacies of the empire through the porous and ambiguous frontiers the wars produced, I map French colonised men’s and European civilians’ agencies – as both agents against and victims of this apparatus. Such an objective repositions them as social actors in the formation of internal and external identification processes in the French Empire and beyond.
I have been hosted by Sciences Po (Paris), the Marc Bloch Zentrum (DAAD-Berlin) and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ Research Fellowship) during my research. I previously worked at the Montreal Holocaust Museum archival collections and participated in several projects, such as the documentary Après Coup, focusing on children of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. I am currently part of the inaugural cohort of fellows for the Research Colloquia on ‘Gender and Sexual Violence’ and ‘The LGBTQIA+ Community in the Holocaust’ at the USC Shoah Foundation (2024-2025). I am also part of the 2024-2025 convenors for the Ambivalent Archives Network.