Marie Robin

Marie Robin is a third-year Ph.D. student in French colonial history at Columbia University where she studies the intersectionality of gender, race, sexuality, and military culture in the 20th-century French Empire. Her dissertation, tentatively entitled, “Managing Sex Overseas in the French Army: Bordel Militaire de Campagne (Mobile Field Brothels), Sexual Violence and Decolonization in Algeria and Vietnam (c. 1940-1960s),” provides the first comprehensive analysis of the strategies, policies, and practices employed by the French military to regulate and control sexual behavior and relationships among its troops during the First Indochina War (1946-1954) and the Algerian War (1954-1962) and the impact of these policies on broader processes of decolonization.

Prior to starting her Ph.D. at Columbia, Marie graduated Summa Cum Laude with a BA in History and Middle-Eastern Studies from the American University of Paris (2017) and completed her MA in History at Durham University (2018). Marie writes public-facing history for the Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal on military prostitution and has translated chapters of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, vol. 1 & 3.