Christina B. Carroll earned her BA in English and History at Vassar College, NY, in 2006. After her graduation, she started her Ph.D study in the History department at UNC Chapel Hill. She completed her thesis, “Defining the French Empire: Memory, Politics, and National Identity, 1860-1900,” under the supervision of Professor Lloyd Kramer in 2015. After completing her Ph.D, Carroll served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Colgate University from 2015-2016 and has taught in the History department at Kalamazoo College in Michigan since 2016. From 2018 to 2021, she held the title of Marlene Crandell Francis Assistant Professor of History at Kalamazoo College.
In 2022, Carroll published her first book, The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850-1900 (Cornell University Press), which is already being used as an important and unique source. Her book is a historical analysis of the ways in which French imperial memory was constructed and utilized in the latter half of the 19th century. Carroll argues that the memory of French imperial conquests was used as a means of legitimizing the French nation-state and maintaining a sense of national unity in the face of internal divisions. She focuses on several key aspects of the construction of imperial memory in France during this time period. First, she explores the ways in which colonial conquests were portrayed in popular culture, including in literature, art, and exhibitions. She argues that these representations often emphasized the glory and heroism of French imperialism, while downplaying or ignoring the violence and exploitation that accompanied it. Second, Carroll examines the ways in which imperial memory was used as a political tool, both domestically and internationally. She argues that French politicians and officials used the memory of colonial conquests to justify their policies, including military interventions in other countries. At the same time, they also used imperial memory to cultivate a sense of national pride and unity among the French people. Finally, Carroll considers the role of imperial memory in shaping French identity and national consciousness. She argues that the memory of colonial conquests played an important role in constructing a sense of French national identity that was both powerful and exclusionary. This identity was based on notions of French superiority, which were rooted in the country’s imperial history.
For Christina Carroll, her experiences as a graduate student at UNC have deeply affected her career. Both her coursework and her experiences as a TA still continue to shape her thinking as a scholar and her pedagogy in the classroom. In her view, perhaps most obviously and important, the suggestions and feedback from the members of her dissertation committee at UNC– Lloyd Kramer, Emily Burrill, Don Reid, Dan Sherman, and Jay Smith– helped create the foundation for what ultimately became her book. Highlighting the relationships she built with her fellow graduate students, Carroll says that these relationships continue to be very important to her and that many of the people with whom she continues to exchange work are former UNC graduate students.
When asked to reflect on her time in the program, Carroll states that a dissertation is a big project, so it should be broken down into smaller pieces. “Sometimes trying to make the chapters of your dissertation perfect as you’re writing them can get in the way of finishing the project. We all know that revising is critical, and that’s even more true of a project that is the length of a dissertation.” When asked about the importance of being a historian, Carroll says that historians are very effective at explaining how and why something came to be the way it is. She notes that her students always ask her to weigh in on the future, but she herself is much less confident in her ability to look in this direction.
Asked why she turned to French history, Carroll notes that she has always been interested in memory and how popular narratives about past events shape the ways in which different people make sense of the present. But the origins of her book are more specifically rooted in research she completed for a different project. Initially working on the memory of the Franco-Prussian War in France and Germany, Carroll realized that some French republican writers framed France’s defeat in the war as an effect of France’s imperial system, which they defined in both Napoleonic and colonial terms. They argued that Napoleon III’s Second Empire was a corrupting force that cultivated decadence and effeminacy among the French people in order to distract public attention from the autocratic nature of the Bonapartist state. “These descriptions invoked the specter of Montesquieu’s ‘oriental despotism’ to discredit Napoleon III. Some writers even described Napoleon III as an Algerian ‘Arab chief,’ implying, essentially, that French colonial rule in Algeria had infiltrated metropolitan France through the person of the emperor himself.” Carroll says that she was struck by the way in which these descriptions criticized the empire by combining a critique of Bonapartist imperialism with racist tropes about North Africa, particularly because she knew that less than a decade later some of these republican writers would support overseas imperial expansion in North Africa and elsewhere as a solution to the political problems of republican France. It should therefore not have come as a surprise that in the intervening years she became interested in exploring how these writers moved from explicitly rejecting empire to explicitly embracing it.
Carroll’s new project, “Transportation, Exile, and Colonial Politics in France and Algeria, 1848-1871,” examines the intersection between two types of transportation: removal of political dissidents from metropolitan France, and restrictions on political dissent among indigenous communities in French colonial Algeria. Examining the debates over these practices within the metropolitan French government and colonial administration, Carroll argues that they reflect broader ideological conflicts over the future of Algeria and the relationship of different communities to France. However, the project focuses primarily on how both Algerian and French transportés opposed governmental attempts to control their movements and relocate them beyond the borders of their communities. Carroll also considers the political impact on the transportés themselves, the places from which they were forcibly removed, and the places to which they were sent, thus tracing the connections between the emergence of modern carceral systems, French imperial structures, and nineteenth-century traditions of radical political thought. “It’s in its infancy, but I hope to make good progress on it during my sabbatical next academic year,” says Carroll.
– Burak Bulkan