Global History of Europe and Switzerland
Faculty of History
She holds a double master's degree from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence, and she obtained in June 2025 a PhD in history from EHESS and the University of Geneva, where she was a doctoral assistant from 2018. She was also affiliated with the SNSF project “Rockefeller Fellows as Heralds of Globalization” (2018-2022), led by Ludovic Tournès (UNIGE), Thomas David (UNIL), and Davide Rodogno (IHEID). Her thesis, entitled “Transnational Constructions and Circulations of Geneva Anthropology: From Lake Geneva to the Black Sea (1845-1960)”, focuses on the transnational history of anthropology in Switzerland and the circulation of racial knowledge between Europe and Western Asia. She was awarded the Vallesiana research grant (2025) for writing an article on the history of racial knowledge in Valais.
Research areas
Mapping Racial Thought and Epistemic Hierarchies: A Transnational History of International Anthropology Congresses (1920-1980)
This postdoctoral project explores the power dynamics that shaped the international anthropological field from 1920 and 1980, challenging the dominant narrative of a linear shift from racial to culturalist paradigm after World War II. By adopting the concept of "field" as a semi-autonomous social space where actors compete for legitimaticy, the research uncovers how racial and biological thought was sustained, transformed, and contested during this period. The project pursues two main objective: 1) mapping transnational alliances and power relations that geographically and institutionally configured the anthropological fied, highlighting asymmetries between centers and peripheries in knowledge production; 2) analyzing how these configurations both reflected and reshaped espitemological and disciplinary frameworks, particularlye through paradigm conflicts (biological, cultural, and social). This research is innovative in three respects: it adopts a global and transnational perspective attentive to the geography of knowledge and the asymmetrical circulation between centers and peripheries; it focuses on international congresses - key arenas for the circulation and legitimization of anthropological knowledge - which have never been the subject of systematic study; and it draws on an original corpus of largely unexplored printed and archival sources (Geneva, London, Paris, Leiden) from 33 congresses organized by three major institutions: the International Institute of Anthropology, the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, and the Colloque des anthropologistes de la langue française.
Faculty of History