A photo of Elizabeth Marcus

October 23, 2019 — Elizabeth Marcus, “Law after Empire : L’Affaire de L’École de Droit de Beyrouth”

This paper uncovers the forgotten history of the “affaire de l’école de droit,” an eight-year long local and international crisis over the languages of legal instruction in the years following the end of the French mandate in Lebanon. By reassembling the moment of transition, and recovering it from the grand, structural narratives of colonization and war that dominate scholarship on Lebanon, the affaire becomes crucial vista in an understanding of the diverse, contradictory and multi-layered experience of decolonization.

Elizabeth Marcus is a Mellon Fellow in the Scholars in the Humanities program at Stanford University and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds. She received her BA from the University of Oxford in Modern History and French, and completed her PhD in French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2017. Elizabeth has taught in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University and at MIT as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Global Studies and Languages Department. Her research focuses on the literatures as well as the intellectual and cultural history of the Francophone and Arab world with a particular interest in the relationship between language and cultural politics, intellectual networks, and migration in the afterlife of the French Empire. Her current manuscript, Difference and Dissidence: Cultural Politics and the End of Empire in Lebanon, 1943-1975, uncovers the response of local actors to the unique period of transition Lebanon at the end of the French mandate to the beginning of the civil war in 1975. During her time as a British Academy Fellow, she will start her second project, Paris and the Global University: International Students and Cultural Internationalism at the Cité Universitaire, 1945-1975, which looks at how the Cité internationale Universitaire, a residential campus in the Parisian outskirts, became a crucible of left and right-wing transnational political and cultural activism during the Trente Glorieuses (1945-1975).

Date/Time
October 23, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Posted in Colloquium, Cultural Studies Events.