Dr Arthur Asseraf

On research leave 2021-2024
I am a historian of modern France, North Africa, and the Mediterranean, with particular interests in the history of colonialism and information.
Born and raised in Paris, I first came to the UK to study at Cambridge in 2007. Since then, I have spent time at Columbia University, the LSE, and the Institut Français du Proche-Orient in Beirut, and conducted my doctoral studies at All Souls College, Oxford, before returning to Cambridge to join the History Faculty. In 2021-2024 I will be Pro Futura Scientia fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala and CRASSH in Cambridge.
Aside from my research and teaching activities, I regularly comment on French and North African news for radio and online media.
I am currently working on two new projects. The first is a microhistory of an Algerian man in the 19th century who carefully manipulated information to generate a huge public scandal in France, West Africa, and Tunisia. The second project takes my research forward in time into the 1960s and 1970s, looking at the relationship between rumour and race in Fifth Republic France.
At the MPhil level, I teach an option on 'The Modern Mediterranean' for the Modern European and World History MPhils.
Contact
Tags & Themes
Pembroke College, Cambridge CB2 1RF
Books
Electric News in Colonial Algeria, (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner of the Middle East Studies Book Prize
Le désinformateur, sur les traces de Messaoud Djebari, (Fayard, 2022)
Articles and chapters
‘Mass Media and the Colonial Informant: Messaoud Djebari and the French Empire, 1880-1901’, Past & Present, February 2022, 161-192
‘La mer immédiate: nouvelles, télégraphe et impérialisme en Méditerranée, 1798-1882’, Monde(s), 16/2, November 2019.
'"A New Israel": Colonial Comparisons and the Algerian Partition that Never Happened', French Historical Studies, 41:1, 2018.
'Making their own internationalism: Algerian Media and a few others the League of Nations Ignored, 1919-1943' in Tworek, Brendebach and Herzer (eds.) Exorbitant Expectations: International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, (Routledge, 2018)
'Weapons of Mass Representation: Algerians in the French Parliament 1958-1962', in Eldridge and Aissaoui (eds.) Algeria Revisited: History, Culture and Identity (Bloomsbury, 2017).