Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus

Fellow, SCAS.
Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies, Newcastle University

Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus is a Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at Newcastle University (UK).
She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2017. Before joining Newcastle as a Lecturer, she was a
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, a Mellon Fellow of Scholars in the Humanities
program at Stanford University, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT.

Elizabeth Marcus is a scholar of the 19th and 20th century French and Francophone worlds, with particular
research interests in colonial and postcolonial history and theory, intellectual and legal history, and the after-
lives of empire. Her work spans French history, Middle Eastern studies, global history, comparative literature,
and postcolonial studies. Her first book, Experiments in Decolonization: Lebanon and the Afterlives of Empire,
examines how local actors differently constructed the afterlife of empire in Lebanon, a country whose language
and administration are marked by the experience of Ottoman and French rule.

While at SCAS, she will be at work on her second monograph, France’s Global University: Education, Empire
and Transnational Entanglements. This book examines left and right-wing transnational political and cultural
activism during the Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975) at the Cité international universitaire de Paris, a residential
campus built in the spirit of international humanism in the wake of the First World War. During this thirty-year
period, the Cité U was more than a simple dormitory; it came to represent and function as a hub of the city’s
global life, an early locus of global migration, and a new model of global education. This interdisciplinary project
brings to light unexpected connections between social anthropology, postcolonial studies, and global and cultural
history, and offers a new window on the post-war and post-colonial moment. France’s Global University ulti-
mately shows how a hybrid group of migrants led to the production of new orders of knowledge, fields of
action and cultural imaginaries in the mid-century period.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.