History Department Faculty
Lorelle Semley
Professor, Director of African and African Diaspora Studies
Lorelle Semley
Contact
Stokes Hall Room S315
Telephone: 617-552-3798
Email: lorelle.semley@bc.edu
Education
- Ph.D., Northwestern University
Research Interests
West African history; African diaspora and Atlantic world; gender; Black French Studies; urban history; legal history
Department
Biography
Lorelle Semley is a historian of Africa and the African diaspora. She is also a core faculty member and current director of the African and African Diaspora Studies program. Her research interests cover West Africa and the Atlantic world with a focus on race, gender, legal history, urban history, and Black French Studies. Her current book project is on the history of African and Caribbean communities in Bordeaux, France from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Her work has been most recently supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.
She is currently Editor-in-chief of History in Africa, one of the two flagship journals of the African Studies Association and an Associate Review Editor for the American Historical Review.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS:
Books
• To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire (Cambridge, 2017). Co-winner, Bentley Book Prize, World History Association, 2018
• Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town (Indiana University Press, 2011).
Edited journal volumes
• With Rosa Carrasquillo and Melina Pappademos, “Historicizing the Images and Politics of the Afropolitan,” Radical History Review 144 (October 2022)
Articles
• “Beyond the Dark Side of the Port of the Moon: Rethinking Bordeaux’s Slave Trade Past,” Histoire sociale/Social History, vol. 53, no.107 (May 2020): 43-69. Winner, French Colonial Historical Society Article Prize, 2021
• “‘Evolution Revolution’ and the Journey from African Colonial Subject to French Citizen,” Law and History Review, 32, 2 (May 2014): 267-307.
• “To Live and Die, Free and French: Toussaint Louverture’s 1801 Constitution and the Original Challenge of Black Citizenship.” Radical History Review 2013 (115): 65-90.
Book chapters
• “Women Citizens of the French Union Unite!: Jane Vialle's Postwar Crusade,” in Anne R. Epstein and Rachel G. Fuchs, eds. Gender and Citizenship in Historical and Transitional Perspective (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2016), 186-210.