Mary D. Lewis is Robert Walton Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University and affiliated faculty at the Harvard Law School. Her current research interests center around international and imperial history, with particular attention paid to the connections between international relations and social or economic life.
Her most recent book, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881-1938, was released by the University of California Press in 2013. Lewis’ book, The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940, was a co-winner of the 2008 James Willard Hurst Prize awarded by the Law and Society Association for the best book in socio-legal history.
Lewis has been awarded such major grants as the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. Lewis is presently beginning a new project on the “First French Decolonization,” which will examine the transformation of France’s Atlantic empire in the 19th century after the loss of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). Lewis was co-president of the Society for French Historical Studies in 2012-2013.
At the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Lewis is a resident faculty and chair of the History Seminar.
Fall Course:
France and the World Since 1870 (Hist 1206)
Spring 2025:
Borders (GENED 1140)
Lewis, Mary D. Divided Rule Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881-1938. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013.
Lewis, Mary D. The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Lewis, Mary D. “Repairing Damage: The Slave Ship Marcelin and the Haiti Trade in the Age of Abolition.” The American Historical Review 125, no. 3 (June 1, 2020): 869–98. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa243.
Lewis, Mary D. “Legacies of French Slave-Ownership, or the Long Decolonization of Saint-Domingue.” History Workshop Journal, no. 83 (2017): 151–75. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbx007.
Lewis, Mary D. “Necropoles and Nationality: Land Rights, Burial Rites and the Development of Tunisian National Consciousness in the 1930s.” Past and Present 205, no. 1 (November 1, 2009): 105–41. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtp035.
Lewis, Mary D. “Geographies of Power: The Tunisian Civic Order, Jurisdictional Politics, and Imperial Rivalry in the Mediterranean, 1881–1935.” The Journal of Modern History 80, no. 4 (2008): 791–830. https://doi.org/10.1086/591111.
