- Judith Surkis
- Position:
RCHA Director
- Bio:
Judith Surkis is Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she specializes in the history of France and the French Empire, North Africa, and gender, intellectual, and legal history. Her research and teaching range across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examining questions of sex and citizenship, colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonial migration, as well as critical theory and historical methodology.
She is currently completing her book The Intimate Life of International Law, which examines how international family law conflicts tested the boundaries of postcolonial sovereignty in France and Algeria, shaping debates about immigration, secularism, feminism, and race across the Mediterranean. An article drawn from that work, “Custody Battles and the Politics of Franco-Algerian Divorce, 1962-1992” published in the Journal of Modern History won the Koren Prize (Best Article in French History in 2022) from the Society for French Historical Studies and the 2024 Chester Penn Higby Prize. A second article, “Oil Lines and Blood Lines: Patrimony, Natural Resources, and Sovereignty between France and Algeria, 1962-1971,” is forthcoming in the journal Capitalism. Her previous book, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria 1830-1930 (Cornell, 2019) won the 2020 book prize by the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies. She is also the author of Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920 (Cornell, 2006) as well as book chapters and articles that have appeared in the American Historical Review, Public Culture, History and Theory, and History of the Present.
Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, the School of Historical Studies and the School of Social Science at Institute for Advanced Study, and the Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women at Brown University. Before coming to Rutgers, she taught at Harvard and Columbia. She has also held visiting professorships at the Ecole normale supérieure, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and the Sorbonne in Paris.
