Elizabeth Foster
Research/Areas of Interest
Modern France in the World, Colonial West Africa, Religion and Empire
Education
- PhD, Princeton University, Princeton, United States, 2006
- AB, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States, 1998
Biography
I specialize in the history of modern France, the French Empire, and colonial West Africa. My first book, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940 (Stanford UP 2013), explores French colonial rule in West Africa through the prism of religion. Based on archival research in France, Senegal, and Italy, it examines how the relationships between French Catholic missionaries, French colonial administrators, and Muslim, Christian, and animist Africans shaped the colonial order in Senegal between 1880 and 1940. My second book, African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church (Harvard UP 2019; French translation with Karthala 2025) examines how African and French Catholics imagined the future of French sub-Saharan Africa in the years just prior to and just after decolonization, and shows how decolonization profoundly shaped the reorientation of Catholicism at mid-century. It draws on a variety of perspectives, including those of French missionaries and theologians, Catholic African priests and intellectuals, militant Catholic African students, and lay activists in Africa and in France, to weave a new history of late colonialism, decolonization, church reform, and the enduring "post-colonial" ties between Europe and its former colonies. With Udi Greenberg, I have also co-edited Decolonization and the Remaking of Christianity (Penn Press, 2023). My new book, forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press, weaves an intimate history of empire through the intertwined lives of four people in what are now Mali and Guinea, from the French conquest to the Second World War and beyond. My work has been supported by NEH, ACLS, and Fulbright fellowships. I presently offer courses on Modern France and the French Empire, the French Revolution, France and Africa, France in the Second World War, Europe in the Twentieth Century, the First World War, and a global survey entitled Empires and Nations.