Miranda Spieler

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Miranda Spieler

Professor

  • Department: History and Politics
  • Graduate Program(s): Diplomacy and International Law
  • Office: 
    G-006

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Professor Miranda Spieler joined the Department of History and Politics at the American University of Paris in 2013. After completing her dissertation at Columbia, she served as a lecturer at Wesleyan and Harvard before joining the University of Arizona's History Department, where she received tenure in 2011. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for Human Values at Princeton University and from the Center for Humanities at Stanford University. Before and during her graduate studies, she served as assistant to the writer Susan Sontag. 

Miranda Spieler is an historian of France and the French overseas empire. Her areas of expertise include  European legal history, slavery and emancipation,  the history of French Guiana and the Caribbean, policing and carceral systems, human rights, and the history of Paris.

Spieler's prize-winning first book, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana  (Harvard, 2012), moves between domestic France and colonial soil to chronicle the lives of convicts, ex-convicts, freed slaves, and non-European immigrants, revealing their envelopment by novel structures of coercion and violence between the French Revolution and the Third Republic.

She is a near-native speaker of French and publishes in both English and French. 

Her forthcoming book, Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories (Harvard, May 2025), is a biographical study of enslaved people who lived in France's capital city between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.  She pieces together vivid, granular portraits of men, women and children who came from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean, revealing their strategies and hiding places, their family histories and relationships to well-known Enlightenment figures. 



Education/Degrees

  • MA, MPhil, PhD, Department of History, Columbia University (2005)
  • AB Magna Cum Laude, Harvard-Radcliffe, Committee on Degrees in History and Literature (1994)

News

  • "Ourika and the Chevalier de Boufflers.” In French Revolutionary Lives. Edited by David Bell and Colin Jones. War Culture and Society. Series editor Rafe Blaufarb et al. Palgrave MacMillan, 2023,  29-47.
  • “The Right to Come and Go,” Law and History Review 38, no. 3 (2020): 555-570.
  • “L’Enlèvement des esclaves de Paris des Lumières.”In Colonisations: notre histoire. Edited by Pierre Singaravélou. Paris: Seuil, 2023, 120-122.
  • “ Viande de barbecue,”L’Épicerie du monde, ed. Pierre Singravalou (Fayard, 2022), 17-21.
  • “Être esclave dans une capitale impériale: Paris XVIIIe siècle.” In Paulin Ismard, Benedetta Rossi, and Cécile Vidal, Histoire mondiale de l’esclavage, (Seuil, 2021), 245-252.
  • “Slave Voice and the Legal Archive: Freedom Suits before the Paris Admiralty Court.” In Sophie White and Trevor Burnard, eds., Hearing Enslaved Voices: African and Indian Slave Testimony in British and French America 1700-1848 (London: Routledge, 2020), 165-187.
  • “Mobility.” In A Culture History of Western Empires, vol. 5, ed. Kristin McKenzie (Bloomsbury, 2019), 109-130.
  • "The Vanishing Slaves of Paris: The Lettre de Cachet and the Emergence of an Imperial Legal Order in Eighteenth-Century France.” In The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept, edited by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr, 230-245.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.  
  • “Abolition and Reenslavement in the Caribbean: The Revolution in French Guiana.” In The French Revolution in Global Perspective, edited by Lynn Hunt, Suzanne Desan, and William Nelson, 132-147. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.

Book Reviews

  • Review of Edenz Maurice, La Guyane: la promesse républicaine: faire France outre-mer 1920-1980 (2022), submitted May 2024, forthcoming H-France.
  • Review of Cecile Vidal, Caribbean New Orleans, in Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 4 (2023): 828-831.
  • Forum comment on David Todd, Velvet Empire (2022), H-Diplo Roundtable, March 2023.
  • “Peasant Resistance in Postrevolutionary Haiti.” Reviews in American History (Sept. 2021), vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 413-42
  • Review of Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (2019), in Slavery and Abolition, September 2021, vol. 42, no. 3: 653-654.
  • Review of Brandon Byrd, The Black Republic: African Americans and the fate of Haiti (2019), in Slavery and Abolition, June 2021, vol. 42, no. 2: 415-417
  • Comment on Patrick Boucheron, France in the World: A New Global History, in H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-1, 6 Nov. 2020.
  • Review of Edward Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World, The William and Mary Quarterly 77, no. 4 (Oct. 2020): 711-715.
  • Review of Pascal Firges, French Revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire, The Journal of Modern History 91, no. 3 (2019): 677-678.
  • Review of Jennifer Palmer, Intimate Bonds, in French History 31, no. 3 (2017): 380-382.
  • Review of Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (2011), Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales 67 (June 2012): 516-518.
  • Comment on Ian Coller, Islam and the Making of Modern Europe 1798-1830, in H-France Forum, vol. 7 (winter 2012).
  • Review of Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902, The Journal of Modern History 83, no.4 (December 2011): 905-907.
  • Review of Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France for H-France 8, no. 107 (Aug. 2008).

Works in Progress/under Contract

  • “Slavery in Europe: 1500-1800,” Oxford Bibliographies.
  • “The Odyssey of Black Soldiers in the Seven Years War.” Essay in special issue on global black biography in Slavery and Abolition, edited by Sue Peabody and Rebekka von Mallinckrodt.  

Publications

Books, book chapters and articles
  • Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories. Harvard University Press. Forthcoming. Publication date: May 2025.
  • “Mobility,” in A Culture History of Western Empires, vol. 5, ed. Kristin McKenzie, 109-130 (Bloomsbury, 2019).
  • “The Vanishing Slaves of Paris: The Lettre de Cachet and the Emergence of an Imperial Legal Order in Eighteenth-Century France.” In Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr, eds., The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
  • “Slave Flight, Slave Torture and the State: Nineteenth Century French Guiana.” French Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 33, no. 1, Spring 2015.
  • “Abolition and Reenslavement in the Caribbean: The Revolution in French Guiana.” In Lynn Hunt, Suzanne Desan, and William Nelson, eds. The French Revolution in Global Perspective. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, April 2013.
  • “France and the Atlantic World.” In Peter McPhee, ed., Blackwell Companion to the French Revolution (2012), 57-72.
  • Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. Harvard Historical Series, Harvard University Press, April 2012. French translation (Alma Éditeur 2016). Awarded the J. Russell Major Prize (2013) and the George Mosse Prize (2013), from the American Historical Association; finalist for the Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies.
  • “The Destruction of Liberty in French Guiana: Law, Identity and the Meaning of Legal Space, 1794-1830,” Social History 32, no. 3 (August 2011): 260-279.
  • “The Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution 1789-1802.” The William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 2 (April 2009): 365-408.
Reviews
  • Review of Jeremy Popkin, You are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (2011). Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales 67 (June 2012): 516-518.
  • Comment on Ian Coller, Islam and the Making of Modern Europe 1798-1830 in H-France Forum, vol. 7 (winter 2012).
  • Review of Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902, The Journal of Modern History 83, no.4 (December 2011): 905-907.
  • Review of Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France for H-France 8, no. 107 (Aug. 2008).

Conferences & Lectures

Invited Talks

  • “Adonis,” Policer les présences noires en Europe dans le long 18e siècle/Policing Black Presence in the Long Eighteenth Century, Abbaye de Royaumont 25-28 June 2023, organized by Ian Coller and Vincent Dénis.
  • “Faire de l’histoire sur le terrain,” L’Ecriture, L’Enseignement; et l’Esclavage en l’honneur de Jean Hébrard, (23 June 2023).
  • “Esclaves domestiques et la police parisienne, » Policer la présence noir en Europe, Paris-Sorbonne I, Paris-Sorbonne I, Centre Malher, organized by l’Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (Paris I-CNRS-ENS) and the University of Californie (Irvine), 16 June 2022.
  • "The Rise and Fall of André Lucidor, an African Swordsman in Paris (c.1718-1771): Race, Sexual Deviance, and the Problem of Freedom in the Eighteenth Century Capital”. Center for Critical Democracy Studies, American University of Paris, 14 November 2022.
  • "The Case of Ourika: Children, the French Slave Trade, and the End of the Rights of Man,” Center for Critical Democracy Studies, American University of Paris, 2 May 2022.
  • “The Chevalier de Boufflers between Senegal and Paris: Slavery and the Man of Feeling,” French Revolutionary Lives Conference, Princeton University, co-sponsored by the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies and the Eighteenth Century Seminar, organized by David Bell and Colin Jones, 9 April 2022.
  • “The Julian Affair,” precirculated paper for the Age of Revolutions E-Seminar, co-sponsored by USC and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Clement Thibaud and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal), 22 February 2022.
  • “Le fardeau des vieilles chaînes: travail et citoyenneté aux Antilles et en Guyane après les abolitions,“ Séminaire Colonisation Pénitentiaire de l`Amérique latine et des Caraïbes, 3 December 2021.
  • “The Julien Affair,” New York French History Group, 21 October 2020 (zoom talk).
  • “On the Lam in Global History,” Mellon Seminar on Genealogy and Kinship, Tufts University, 10 March 2020.
  • “L’Italie et l’Antiquité : imaginaire et voyage au siècle des Lumières » (final comment/conclusions de la journée), Sorbonne Journée d’Étude, 21 June 2019. Organized by Giovanna Cesarani, Jean-François Dunyach, and Simon MacDonald.
  • “Slaves before the Paris Admiralty Court,” Miami Law School, 25 February 2019.
  • “Between Slavery and Freedom in Eighteenth-Century France: A Tale of Two Cities,” Indiana Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Annual Workshop, 10 May 2018. Organized by Rebecca Spang.      
  • “Slavery in Imperial Paris,” Legal Histories of Slavery, Stanford Law School, 15 March 2018. Organized by Amalia Kessler and Elizabeth Katz.
  • “Droit et justice,” Colloque international formation et transformation des sociétés nouvelles en situation coloniale aux Amériques du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, 18 décembre 2017, EHESS, Paris. Organized by Cécile Vidal.
  • “Slave Voice and the Legal Archive: The Case of Freedom Suits before the Paris Admiralty Court,” Slave Narratives in British and French America, 1700–1848, Notre Dame London Global Gateway, 14 July 2017. Organized by Sophie White and Trevor Burnard.
  •  “Les esclaves sur le sol libre: relecture de Paris comme ville impériale, v. 1760 – v. 1790.“ Invited talk for “Pour une histoire transnationale et globale de la France,” Faculty seminar organized by Nicolas Delalande (Science-Po), Quentin Deluermoz (Paris 13), and Blaise Wilfert-Portal (ENS), 21 June 2016.
  • “The Slaves of Paris: Revelations from the Archives de la Bastille,” Beyond France, Columbia University faculty seminar, co-chaired by Gregory Mann and Emmanuelle Saada, New York, 10 April 2015.
  • “Slave Flight, Slave Torture, and the State: Nineteenth Century French Guiana.” The Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Ohio, 24 February 2014.
  • “The lettre de cachet and the operations of sovereignty in Ancien Régime France.” Sovereignty: Stages and Frontiers, New York University, May 3-4 2013.
  • “The Vanishing Black Children of Paris.” Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, Law and the French Atlantic, Newberry Library, 5 October 2012.
  • “Revisiting the Free Soil Principle,” talk on 21 Sept. 2012 at Uppsala University (Sweden), in Faculty Seminar on Colonial Courts in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean 17th-19th Centuries, organized by Fredrik Thomasson.
  • “The perils of pluralism in the French Atlantic: The erosion of revolutionary liberty and the transition back to slavery in French Guiana 1794-1809, ” the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, New Perspectives on Legal Pluralism, Newberry Library, Chicago, 23 April 2010.
  • Slaves, Strangers, and the Limits of Revolutionary Citizenship: The Jacobin Structure of Colonial Rule,” Membership in Communities and States in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Legal Rules, Social Judgments, and the Negotiation of Citizenship, Newberry Library, Chicago, 14 October 2005
  • “Slaves, Freed People and the Revolutionary Rights Tradition 1789-c. 1799,” Harvard Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 10th Anniversary Conference, August 2005.
  • “Dying to the Law,” Death in the Eighteenth Century, Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Studies Workshop, Indiana University, May 2003.

Papers, Comments, Roundtables at Professional Meetings

  • “Rethinking Race, the Colonial and the Postcolonial in Contemporary France,” December 13-15, 2022, commentator, University of Chicago (Paris). 
  • Commentary on Cécile Vidal et al., Une histoire sociale du nouveau monde, at the Journée Mondes Américaines, 11 March 2022, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Campus Condorcet.
  • “Slavery and the Enlightened Self: The Correspondence of the Chevalier de Boufflers from Africa,“ panel on Letter-Writing and the Age of Revolution: Politics, Authenticity, and the Limits of Resistance, SSFH Annual Conference, 28 June 2021.
  • “Marrons de la Guyane Française: la loi et la violence 1830-1870.” Annual meeting of the Caribbean Studies Association, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 6 June 2016.
  • “Law and the Humanities.” Roundtable discussion, American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New York City, 4 January 2015.
  • “What is the Age of Revolutions? The Transnational Perspective.” Roundtable discussion, Consortium on the Revolutionary Era Annual Meeting, Oxford, Mississippi, 21 Feb. 2014.
  •  “The Unmaking of Free Soil in French Guiana: Land and Law During the Transition Back to Slavery.” Invited talk in mini-conference organized by Lynn Hunt on the French Revolution in Global Context, Consortium on Revolutionary Europe Annual Meeting, Tallahassee, 3-5 March 2011.
  • “The Leblond Affair (1812-1830): Land, Law, and Fictions of Identity in the New Regime.” Western Society of French History Annual Meeting, Lafayette, Louisiana, 23 Oct. 2010.
  • Comment for panel on civil law and society with Judith Surkis, Sylvia Schaffer, and Camille Robcis. Society for French Historical Studies Annual Meeting, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 4 April 2008.
  •  “The Legal Framework for Convict and Ex-Convict Life in French Guiana 1852-1870.” American Society for Legal History Annual Meeting, Tempe, Arizona, 27 October 2007.
  •  “Maroons and Colonists in French Guiana.” French Colonial History Society Annual Meeting, La Rochelle, 8 June 2007.
  •  “French Guiana between the Two Emancipations.” Society for French Historical Studies Annual Meeting, Houston, TX, 16 March 2007.
  • “Commissarial Dictatorship and the Overseas Empire,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era Annual Meeting, Arlington, VA, 2 March 2007.
  • “Estranged Dominion: The Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Directory 1795-1799,” Society for French Historical Studies Annual Meeting, Champaign-Urbana, IL, March 2006.
  • “Leaving the Republic? Legal fictions of absence and revolutionary Terror: the case of the émigrés,” Society for French Historical Studies Annual Meeting, Stanford, CA, April 2005.
  • “The Dry Guillotine,” Harvard Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, August 2002.
  • “Myths and Realities of the Guillotine Sèche,” Society for French Historical Studies Annual Meeting, Toronto, April 2002.
  • “Civic deviance and National Frontiers: The Clergy and the Legislative Assembly,” Consortium on Revolutionary Europe (Auburn), February 2001.

General Audience

  • "Les romanciers peuvent-ils être témoins du passé ? l’histoire de l’esclavage à travers les archives, ses lacunes, et la question du témoignage." Mediathèque Malakoff (25 May 2024).
  • Roundtable about slavery, colonialism, and public memory at the centre d’art de Malakoff (24 mai 2024).
  • “Violence létale, violence raciale, dans les sociétés esclavagistes. Round-table, Rendez-vous de l’Histoire, Blois (7 Oct. 2023).
  • One of three historians to speak at "Patrimoines déchaînés, un atelier professionnel à Nantes." Workshop for museum curators at the Musée de Nantes, co-sponsored by the Fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage (19 Sept. 2023).
  • Speaker at "Marroner la légende : Napoléon et l’esclavage," La Villette, Fondation pour la Mémoires de l’ Esclavage. Public conversation about reenslavement with Florence Aléxis (1 July 2021).
  • One of three discussants at filmed memorial roundtable on H-France, “Remembering Dominique Kalifa, 1957-2020,” organized by Stephane Gerson.
  • Speaker at "Napoléon et l'outre-mer : quel bicentenaire ?" Conversation about the reestablishment of slavery in 1802 with Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, event sponsored by the Association des Professeurs d’Histoire et de Géographie and La Fondation pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage, 6 May 2021.
  • Radio interview about colonial history with host Shelly de Vito for Vocable Magazine, 12 Sept. 2017.
  • Solo guest on French and English-language versions of Focus, long format (20 minute) TV news program, 10 April 2017.
  • Television interview in English about uprising in French Guiana for France 24, 4 April 2017.
  • Television interview with Mohamed Kacim for “64’: l’essentiel du monde en français,” TV5 Monde, Paris, 11 July 2016.
  • Radio interview with Emmanuel Laurentin, host of “La Fabrique de l’histoire,” France Culture, 11 April 2016.
  • Citoyenneté et Esclavage: aux marges de l’empire au XIXe siècle. Public lecture/interview, Rendez-vous de l’histoire (book festival), Blois (France), 9 October 2015.
  •  Français ici et là-bas? Citoyenneté, Colonies et Décolonisation. Public conversation with Cécile Vidal and Bernard Trepied, Pompidou Museum, Paris, 3 Nov. 2014.

Affiliations

  • French historical society
  • Western society for French history
  • American society of legal history
  • French colonial history society

Research Areas

Legal history, legal theory, slavery and abolition, race, criminality, colonial history, history of Paris, France 1750-1850.

Awards, Fellowships and Grants

  • External Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center, Sept. 2017-June 2018.
  • Faculty Fellow, George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention, 2016-present.
  • J. Russell Major Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in English related to France, 2013.
  • George L. Mosse Prize for a book of “extraordinary scholarly distinction, creativity and originality in the intellectual history of Europe since 1500” from the American Historical Association, 2013.
  • Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, 2007-8.
  • Comargo Foundation Fellowship, Spring 2007-8 (declined).
  • Social and Behavior Sciences Research Institute Grant, Univ. Arizona, Spring 2006.
  • Whiting Fellowship, 2001-2.
  • Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, 2000.

Curriculum Vitae