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Olivia CockingGraduate Student

I am a fifth-year PhD candidate the history of modern France and its empire. My dissertation examines how decolonization and European integration have shaped the meaning of welfare in France between the 1950s and the beginning of the twentieth century. It charts how migrant families, social workers, activists, social scientists, and government officials all came to articulate competing visions of social and economic rights in France against a backdrop of anticolonial wars and post-independence state-building. The end of empire turned former colonial citizens, including many migrants living in France, into foreigners. But in reality, they remained entangled in France’s economy and society in multitude ways. Using a series of case studies, my dissertation reveals how these entanglements shaped the welfare state. I argue that social and economic rights were a key site where colonial inequalities were preserved and entrenched after empire through both discriminatory laws and regulatory regimes, and informal practices.

This research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the American Historical Association, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Chateaubriand Fellowship of the French Embassy in the United States, as well as Emory’s Department of History.

Education

  • B.A. University of British Columbia & Sciences Po Paris
  • M.S.t. University of Oxford

Research Interests

Modern Europe
France
Empire

Faculty Advisors

Judith A. Miller
Tehila Sasson