Amelia Spooner

I specialize in the social and political history of law in the French empire. Methodologically my work is informed by historical sociology and critical geography, comparative and transimperial histories, and theorizations of racial capitalism and social reproduction.

My dissertation, tentatively titled "Formally Free: Regulating Labor After Slavery in the French Empire, 1820s–1870s," looks at the legal and extralegal project to define and manage work and workers in French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion Island after the second abolition of slavery. The project examines the negotiations and contestations between administrators, jurists, and employers formulating regulations and the workers to whom they ostensibly applied. I account for unevenness in how labor law devised in the metropole was applied and adapted, and in many cases contravened and abandoned, in these four post-slavery contexts. My research seeks to uncover how the regulation of "free labor" produced both marketable commodities and particular relations of domination: racialized, gendered, and classed divisions among workers across French colonial space.

Teaching

from spring 2025 onwards
Lecturer in History, joint masters program in the social sciences, École normale supérieure (ENS) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)

Lecturer in History, Institut d'Études politiques de Fontainebleau, Université Paris-Est Créteil

Research Fellowships

January 2023–October 2023
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, Archives nationales d'outre-mer (ANOM) and the Université de La Réunion

January 2022–December 2022
International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Social Sciences Research Council, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Institut des mondes africains (IMAF)

September 2021–December 2021
Chateaubriand Fellowship, Embassy of France in the United States, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Institut des mondes africains (IMAF)

Summer 2018
Alliance-Council for European Studies Fellowship, Archives nationales d'outre-mer (ANOM)

2019
Columbia University, Master of Arts in History

2010
Columbia University, Bachelor of Arts in History & Anthropology