Dr Saliha Belmessous

Licence, Université Lyon III-Jean Moulin; MA Université Lyon III and Université de Montréal; Ph.D., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1999.
Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow
Room 706 MacCallum Building
+ 61 2 9351 2998


I joined the History Department as a Research Associate in 2000. I now hold an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral fellowship.

• Early-modern French history
• Colonial history (French, European, Atlantic)
• History of race
• European-Indigenous relations

Assimilation and Empire. Book. Manuscript in preparation.

The post September 11, 2001, environment has seen the strong resurgence of the politics of assimilation in Western countries. The same period has seen a similarly strong re-emergence in both the idea and the actuality of empire and imperial ambitions. These two political goals –assimilation and empire– are not accidentally associated. They possess histories that have been closely bound together and were in many ways interdependent over the past 500 years. The aim of this project is to unravel those histories, to explore the ways in which assimilation and empire have been related and to understand why they were related.

‘Le monument Lapérouse à Sydney ou l’histoire d’un mythe colonial franco-australien’, Outre-Mer: Revue d’histoire 94: 350-351 (2006), 51-68.

‘Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy’, American Historical Review 110: 2 (April 2005) 322-349.

‘Etre français en Nouvelle-France: Identité française et identité coloniale aux dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles’, French Historical Studies 27: 3 (Summer 2004), 507-40.

D’un préjugé culturel à un préjugé racial: la politique indigène de la France au Canada, 1672-1763. (Lille: ANRT, 1999).