IOWC PhD Student: Sarah Ghabrial

Sarah’s research areas include nineteenth- and twentieth-century North and East Africa under French rule, slavery and emancipation the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and colonial and post-colonial regimes of citizenship and 'multiculturalism.' She is also interested in the development of sexual and gendered identities and feminist movements in Islamic cultural contexts, both within and outside the MENA.

Sarah’s interest in colonial history and feminist methodologies began while pursuing a B.A. (Hons) in International & Comparative Studies and Political Science at Huron University College at the University of Western Ontario (2004). She earned her Master's degree in History at Queen's University (2006), where she studied French post-colonial immigration policies set within a broader history of the colonial management of citizenship in Algeria. Subsequently, her cognate paper entitled "Beyond Multicultural Citizenship: Finding Feminism in the Headscarf Affair of 1989," explored anxieties of republican secularism and the management of racial and religious difference through a study of the national scandal in France that was triggered when two girls of North African descent were expelled from school for wearing religious head coverings.

Sarah’s doctoral research steps further into the past and widens the context of these problematics. Her dissertation explores the organization of colonial legal regimes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Algeria – specifically Kabylie and the M'zab valley, regions whose incorporation into French jurisdictional – and juridical – authority were especially complex. This was an age of renewed European enthusiasm for the ‘emancipation’ of Africans, which in the Algerian context often intersected with the ubiquitous ‘Woman Question’ and on-going debates over the limits of French intervention into local marriage, divorce, kinship, and cohabitation practices. This thesis is centrally concerned with how the women at the heart of these debates navigated these historical shifts, and how they used legal reform to realize and redefine emancipationist agendas both within and beyond courts and tribunals. In following slavery- and marriage-related polemic and litigation, this study also traces the material impacts of a sustained Orientalist program to render pre-colonial legal systems knowable and predictable. In order to better assess and illustrate the transnational nature of these changes and their predicted and unintended impacts on gender relations and labour patterns, Sarah’s study will at points turn to comparative examples from elsewhere in the French Empire, especially the Comoro Islands off the east coast of Africa.

2011 "Histoire d'une petite négresse': Finding the slave-wives of the Mzab Valley, Algeria (1890-1910)." Paper presented at Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, USA, 9 December 2011.

2011 "Finding the Slave-Wives of the Mzab, Algeria (1890-1910)." Paper presented at the IOWC, McGill University, Montreal, QC, 24 November 2011.

2011 "Our Lady of Africa Embodied: 'Regenerating the Muslim Woman' in the Algerian stations of the Missionaires d'Afrique, 1890-1930." Paper presented at Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Amherst, MA, USA, 10 June 2011.

2011 "The Jurisprudence of Emancipation: The 'Woman Question' in French colonial Legal Doctrine in Algeria, 1890‐1920." Paper presented at the 37th Annual Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, Toronto, ON, 4 June 2011.

2011 "Modernizing the Muslim Family: Law reform and emancipation in Colonial North Africa, 1890-1930." Paper presented at the IOWC, McGill University, Montreal, QC, 7 April 2011.

2011 "Le 'Fiqh francisé'?: Law reform and the Modern Muslim Family in Algeria, 1890-1918." Paper presented at Colonies and Post-colonies of Law, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, 18 March 2011.

2011 "The Path to Democracy: from Tahrir Square to Tiananmen." Panel at Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, 1 June 2011.

2010 "Catholic religious, colonial feminisms and cults of domesticity in southern Algeria, 1890-1905." Paper presented at the McGill-Queen’s Graduate Conference in History, McGill University, Montreal, QC, 12-13 March 2010.

2009 "The Missionaires d'Afrique and 'Women's Liberation' in French colonial Africa, 1870-1940." Paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, USA, 21-24 November 2009.

2009 "Redemption Tales: Becoming white and finding 'freedom' on the Barbary Coast, 1600-1800." Paper presented at the IOWC International Conference, "Debt and Slavery: The History of a Process of Enslavement," IOWC, McGill University, Montreal, QC, 7-9 May 2009.

2009 "The limits of secular citizenship in French Algeria, 1865-1900." Paper presented at the Second Annual IOWC Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference on Africa, IOWC, McGill University, Montreal, QC, 27 April 2009.

2008 "Anti-Slavery and Missionary Work in Algeria and the Comoros." Paper presented at the Workshop on Madagascar, "Humans Health and Environment in Madagascar," IOWC, McGill University, Montreal, QC, 10 October 2008.

2006 "The Making of the Non-Citizen: From subjects to immigrants in the French-Algerian transpolitical space." Paper presented at the Ethnicity and Democratic Governance Research Group's Conference on Multiculturalism and Religious Difference in Democracies, Montreal, QC, 24 March.

2005 "Negotiating Feminist Identities in Islam: Questions and Conversations for an International Feminisms Project." Paper presented at the History Department, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, 22 November 2005.