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Luke Scalone

Ph.D in History, 2020

Graduated in 2020

Luke Scalone is a historian of modern France and the French colonial empire in North Africa. More specifically, his research looks at the forging of a “Vichy Tunisia.”  His work examines the relationship of the French colonial administration with various communities in Tunisia during the 1930s, ultimately concluding that the colonial administration in Tunisia favored Vichy over the Free French because of political exigencies that predated the onset of the Second World War and the Fall of France in 1940.  This contrasts with standard accounts of the rise of Vichy in the French colonial empire in that it rejects the argument that Vichy took power in the colonies simply because Vichy was the “legitimate” French government after the summer of 1940.  In doing so, he analyzes relationships and tensions between the French colonial administration and an arrangement of groups including the Neo-Destour Party, alongside the larger Tunisian nationalist movement; the political active and numerically significant Italian settler community; and the extreme-right Parti Populaire Français. In addition to his research at Northeastern, he has taught courses on Colonialism/Imperialism & World History, is a network editor for H-French-Colonial,  co-organizes a North Africa working group for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in the Boston area, and has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre d’Etudes Maghrébines à Tunis.

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Cohort: 2016

Research Interests: Modern France & the French Colonial Empire; Colonial North Africa; Pacific Worlds; Comparative Empire; Settler Colonialism; the Global 1930s; World War II; Global Fascism; World History

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