Marie E. Robin | Historian & Harvard Postdoctoral Fellow

I am a historian of modern France and its Empire, with a focus on North Africa and Southeast Asia.

I am currently working on a book based on my dissertation, which examines French military brothels (Bordels Militaires de Campagne, BMC) and sexual violence during France’s two major wars of decolonization—Vietnam and Algeria (c. 1940–1960s).

The research for this project took me to archives across France, Vietnam, and Morocco and was supported by the Georges Lurcy Fellowship, the American Historical Association, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Journal of Women’s History, the Alliance Doctoral Mobility grant and funders at Columbia University, including the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics.

I currently hold a Postdoctoral Fellowship as an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at Harvard University. I earned my PhD in History from Columbia University in 2026. Before Columbia, I received an M.A. in History at Durham University, and graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Paris.