Caroline Séquin to deliver Jones Faculty Lecture

Caroline Séquin, associate professor of history | Photo by Emily Feinsod

As the keynote speaker delivering the Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Faculty Lecture 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 5, associate professor of history Caroline Séquin will discuss France’s use of legal and extra-legal policies to prevent the formation of interracial marriages.

“It’s truly an honor to have been selected for the Jones Faculty Lecture,” Séquin says. “The Lafayette faculty is incredibly prolific in their research, and so to have been picked to give this lecture was a pleasant surprise. I look forward to sharing my research with students and faculty who are not necessarily deeply familiar with France’s racial politics.”

Séquin’s research seeks to show how the management of the intimate has been deeply intertwined with racialized projects of governance. Her lecture topic was inspired by her first book, Desiring Whiteness, in which she examines how the regulation of commercial sex served to police racial relations in France and colonial Senegal in the century following the abolition of slavery. She is currently in the early stages of research for her second book, which focuses on the history of interracial marriage in France and the French Empire in the 20th century. 

Séquin says the lecture will benefit anyone who is interested in thinking about how racial politics operate in an environment other than the United States. “To this day, there is a lot of reluctance to talk about race and racism in France,” she says. “Yet it is essential to understand how despite France’s reputation and self-perception as a race-blind nation, racial beliefs and prejudice have shaped France’s laws and institutions.”

The talk is sponsored by the Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Faculty Lecture and Awards Fund, established in 1966 to recognize superior teaching and scholarship at Lafayette.

“Prof. Séquin has already established herself as one of the rising stars in the field of the history of sexuality, and this promises to be a very thought-provoking lecture,” says Joshua Sanborn, David M. ’70 and Linda Roth Professor of History and department head. “After reading her prize-winning book on race, sexuality, and prostitution in the French Empire, I am eager to hear some of the results of her new research on mixed-race marriages.”