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 media, colonialism, and race.
Born and raised in Paris, I first came to the UK to study at Cambridge. Since then, I have spent time studying in the USA, UK, and Lebanon, before returning to Cambridge to join the History Faculty in 2017. I have also held visiting positions in France, and in 2023-2024 I am Pro Futura Scientia fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala.
Aside from my research and teaching activities, I write and contribute to media in a variety of formats on contemporary issues in North Africa, France, and on the history of colonialism more broadly.
I am currently working on two projects. The first focuses on how people talked about race in France in the 1960s and 1970s in the years after decolonization. The second is a history of how radio technology changed space in the Mediterranean in the 20th century.
Contact
Tags & Themes
Pembroke College, Cambridge CB2 1RF
Books
Colonisations: notre histoire (Seuil, 2023) (co-coordinator)
Le désinformateur, sur les traces de Messaoud Djebari, (Fayard, 2022)
Electric News in Colonial Algeria, (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner of the Middle East Studies Book Prize
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).