Prof. Mélanie Lamotte

Mélanie Lamotte is an assistant professor of history at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge, and was subsequently a fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Program at Stanford University. She is a historian of race, colonialism, and slavery in the early modern period. Her work focuses on the French colonial world, with an emphasis on Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, French Louisiana, Senegal, and Isle Bourbon, in the southwestern Indian Ocean.

Her award-winning first book, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2026), is a richly detailed transoceanic history of the early French Empire. It illuminates how the empire became bound by a common legal culture of race—as well as how enslaved and free people of non-European descent critically shaped the making and unmaking of the French colonies.

Professor Lamotte is now working on two book projects. Her second monograph, Born to Unknown Parents: A Historian’s Search for Black Lives in the Archives of Caribbean Slavery, explores enslaved people’s everyday domestic, social, and economic lives. Grounded in extensive archival research, it interweaves historical analysis with brief memoiristic passages and culminates in a chapter tracing more than two centuries of her family’s history.

Her third monograph, Worlds of the Enslaved: Domestic, Social, and Economic Life in the Early French Empire, will broaden the geographical scope of this research. It will offer a richly documented history “from below” of slavery across an unprecedented range of French colonies and outposts in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Its digital companion, “Visualizing Middle Passages,” will map French slave-ship voyages across these oceans over time and illuminate enslaved people’s experiences aboard these vessels.

Lamotte has published a co-edited volume with Pierre Singaravélou, titled Colonisations: Notre Histoire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2023), which has been acclaimed by many major journals and newspapers in France, the UK, the United States, and Canada, including H-France, French Studies, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Canadian Historical Review, the London Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro, L’Obs, Libération, Philosophie Magazine, and Télérama.

Prof. Lamotte has written award-winning articles and book chapters on color prejudice in the French Caribbean, the archives available to historians of French Louisiana, the origins of the French empire, the standardization of early modern French colonial policies, intimacies beyond sex in the French Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and enslaved people's economies for peer-reviewed journals like the William and Mary Quarterly, French Politics, Culture & Society, and Slavery & Abolition.

Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the Mellon Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, the Library of Congress, the Center for History and Economics at Harvard and Cambridge, the Newton Trust, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University.