About

Todd Shepard is the Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. His scholarship explores how imperialism and transnational developments shaped late-twentieth-century France, with a focus on modern European and colonial North African history, particularly their intersections. Shepard's research and teaching have concentrated on topics such as modern France, the French empire, decolonization, gender, and sexuality. He authored 'The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France' (2006), which examines the close of the Algerian War and the re-negotiation of French state structures and national identity, earning awards from the American Historical Association and the Council of European Studies. His work also includes '1962: Comment l’indépendance algérienne a transformé la France' and 'Voices of Decolonization: A Brief History with Documents.' Shepard's research extends to the re-emergence of sexual Orientalism in post-decolonization French politics, as detailed in his book 'Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979,' which analyzes how discussions of sex in France during the 1960s and 70s were intertwined with questions of empire, colonial violence, and racism. Currently, Shepard is working on projects examining affirmative action, the race question in the Cold War context, and the transnational and international connections of French history beyond empire. His work emphasizes a transnational lens, focusing on how power and institutions were involved in shaping post-colonial and imperial histories. Shepard has also contributed to edited volumes and continues to develop scholarship that maps colonial connections alongside broader transnational developments.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Humanities
• Art
• Engineering
• History
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Chapter 15. The Forty-Ninth Wilaya: The Marseille Mosaic and Algerian Accents

  Berghahn Books · 2023-01-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• L’Arabe au sexe-couteau

  Esprit · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Political Science
  • Humanities

  L’historien américain montre que l’orientalisme sexuel, en particulier les fantasmes sur « l’homme arabe », informe les débats publics en France à la suite à la guerre d’Algérie, à droite avec la peur de l’invasion, à gauche avec le modèle révolutionnaire.

  PublisherDOI

• Decolonization

  Routledge eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law

  This essay draws from seminal works by historians since the 1990s that bring the histories of feminism and decolonization into dialogue. It takes literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) as an important provocation for subsequent historical work. Current summons to “decolonize” knowledge, history, the academy, and other discussions or institutions provides one frame, which gives particular attention to what some have called the “first wave” of decolonization: the series of South and North American countries that freed themselves from Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, and France during the so-called Atlantic Revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Key developments in these histories challenge the claims that anchor decolonial theory, even as they also demonstrate that the exclusion of women from political life was foundational to American developments, as it was concurrently in Europe. Developments in India, fin-de-siècle Turkey and Japan, Algeria, and Nigeria all receive extended attention, as histories that illuminate wider developments through the so-called era of decolonization, in the mid-twentieth century.

  PublisherDOI

• Practices Make Pertinent: Prospecting and Histories of the Present

  Modern Intellectual History · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Most historians let collective memories guide their work, with what needs to be studied already understood to matter. This is particularly true for histories of the recent past, in which primary-source research serves, to quote Michel Foucault, “to refresh memory.” Memorial histories are of different types—including nationalist histories, militant histories, and family or group histories—and useful. There are other approaches to studying the past, however, that can help even those committed to memorial practices. This article draws from work by Bonnie G. Smith, Laura Doan, and Foucault to home in on two key historical practices: “primary-source work” and “historiography.” A sharper awareness of what these practices are, their possibilities, and, of pressing importance, their limits—what they cannot or tend not to reveal, what they in fact render more difficult to see—could help make debates about presentism more convincing. The article proposes “prospecting” as a way to identify research topics that might stimulate present-day discussions and also engage other scholars.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• MORE THAN A STAGE: DECOLONIZATION, ANAL SEX, AND THE DIRTY EROTICS OF POWER IN DELEUZE, GUATTARI, DEVEREUX, AND HERZOG

  Modern Intellectual History · 2018-05-07

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The footprint of Dagmar Herzog's scholarship has moved from Germany to the United States, then back again, before expanding outwards across Europe as well as to spaces drawn into Europe's orbit by conquest. Historically specific intersections between gender, religion, and politics are her specialty, with sexuality and sex as crucial sightlines in the constantly shifting landscapes that these always-moving parts compose. No historian currently writing in English on the late modern period, arguably, more acutely captures the intensity and conflicts that absorb individuals as well as larger groups as they live in and through these distinct topographies. This she does, in part, through the depth and the breadth of her research, which allow Herzog to reveal connections and disjunctures in ways that grab the reader's attention as well as explain the stakes. Her writings reveal an ability to listen to sources and care about what they intimate that is more often seen in certain scholars of the medieval or other exotic histories that rely on scarce or sketchy sources. For historians of the modern era, between the birth of ideology and ready access to endless and dense types of documentation, what Herzog continues to do is a revelation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism, 1988–2015</i> . Edited by <scp>Patrick Crowley</scp> <i>Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism, 1988–2015</i> . Edited by CrowleyPatrick. (Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 8.) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. 296 pp., ill.

  French Studies · 2018-10-15

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Over the last two decades, anglophone scholars trained as students of France have paid rather heated attention to Algeria, embracing various frames to analyse Algerians and Algeria in relation to France and the French, whether as a colony, as an extension of the metropole, in the context of Francophonie, or by placing ‘metropole and colony in a single analytic field’ (see Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. by Stoler and Cooper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 1–56 (p. 4)). This, ironically, has led to vibrant scholarly discussions in which ‘Algeria’ is at stake but in which scholars trained as specialists of Algeria itself are in the minority (or wholly absent), and this makes the collection of essays that Patrick Crowley has edited and introduced particularly welcome. It is the only recent edited collection that I know of to focus on Algeria, but what really sets it apart is how Crowley has brought together scholars wholly attentive to what their evidence reveals about Algeria in recent decades with others who also take seriously how ‘cultural artefacts — such as the novel, film, music, dance, and the visual arts — can both represent what was or is and help fabricate new ways of thinking, whether among scholars or their publics’ (p. 3). Two additional frames help such diverse approaches hang together: the particular attention each article gives to transnational dynamics and developments, and the welcome focus on developments since 1988, when Algeria’s Arab Spring avant la lettre led to the end of single-party rule by the Front de libération nationale, the party that had led the country to independence from France in 1962. Crowley’s Introduction effectively maps out why each of these frames is so useful to scholarship on contemporary Algeria. Another great strength of the collection is to give readers access to exciting work by promising young scholars — Fanny Gillet’s ‘The Archive and Contemporary Art in Algeria (1992–2012)’ and Samuel Sami Everett’s ‘The Many (Im)possibilities of Contemporary Algerian Judaïtés’ stand out, as each attends closely to Algerian materials to make novel interventions in discussions that stretch beyond Algeria (and France) — as well as to the most important historians in France and the UK currently working on Algeria; the articles by Malika Rahal, James McDougall, and Walid Benkhaled and Natalya Vince are important in their own right but also introduce readers to approaches and questions each has pioneered in other recently published work. Benkhaled and Vince’s ‘Performing Algerianness: The National and Transnational Construction of Algeria’s “Culture Wars”’ is a must-read for graduate students and other scholars entering into research that touches on Algeria’s recent history. They draw heavily on analytic schemas that Rahal and McDougall have introduced, to make a compelling case that, despite the often intense political, linguistic, religious, or other debates that divide them — or perhaps because of them — contemporary Algerians share ‘a social cohesiveness that, when taken at face value, the actual content of the debates denies’ (p. 265). They argue for a ‘post-dramatic analysis of Algeria’ (p. 266), a convincing argument that — in the way they anchor it in empirical evidence, Foucauldian discourse analysis, and theatre studies — nicely summarizes the utility of this interdisciplinary collection.

  PublisherDOI

• The Global Erotics of the French Sexual Revolution

  2017-07-20 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter provides a new perspective on both the global sexual revolution and on what made this phenomenon &quot;French&quot; in France. Expanding the chronology and the field of analysis, to look far to the right as well as to the left, makes clear that Front Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionnaire (FHAR) invocations of &quot;Arabs&quot; tells us about more than homosexual identity politics. An examination of the unexpected intersections of public sex talk and Algerians also renders visible the foundational roles post-decolonization concerns played in French political developments over the course of the sixties. During the struggle for independence, anti-imperialist writers and Algerian nationalist propagandists forced attention to and redefined the erotics of empire. Their tactics and arguments upset longstanding certainties and undercut French efforts to deploy them. While this dynamic can be identified in diverse struggles over colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, the Algerian revolution rendered it strikingly visible.

  PublisherDOI

• 16. Between Douai and the U.S.A.

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2017-03-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 28. Decolonization and the Republic

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2017-02-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Six / Prostitution and the Arab Man, 1962–1979

  2017-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter discusses the unexpected fears about prostitution from 1962-1979 in order to ask how in the post-decolonization era of sexual liberation the racialized fears that had long been prominent in French discussions of prostitution, as the very moniker "the traffic in white women" trumpets, became central to the assessment of venal sex. It focuses on an interlinking set of narratives about prostitution, which turned around the supposedly insatiable lusts of Maghrebi men now living in France as immigrant workers and their need for prostitutes. They suggested that France was playing a dangerous game in allowing such people on its soil. It ends by linking or synthesizing sources of fear and loathing, pimps and clients, and catalyzed panic about male sexuality and male failures between France and Algeria, Europe and North Africa.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jennifer Dybmann

  4 shared

• Rémi Labrusse

  2 shared

• Clément Baude

  2 shared

• G. D. Coleman

  1 shared

• Joan Wallach Scott

  1 shared

• Francesca Trivellato

  Institute for Advanced Study

  1 shared

• Camille Robcis

  1 shared

• Каруна Мантена

  University of Helsinki

  1 shared

Education

• BA, College of Letters

  Wesleyan University

  1991

Awards & honors

• American Historical Association's 2006 J. Russell Major Priz…
• Council of European Studies' 2008 Book Prize