Research Fields

• Modern French History
• European Colonialism
• French Republicanism
• North African History
• Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews
• Gender and Sexuality

About

Yuval Tal is a historian of modern France and the French colonial Empire in North Africa. His research brings the history of Christians, Muslims, and Jews from across Europe and the Mediterranean into a shared analytical framework. This desegregated method allows him to bridge the divide between national and imperial histories of Europe and bring into view sublimated ethnic premises and biases that haunt European liberal democracies.

Selected Publications

“The ‘Latin’ Melting-Pot: Ethnorepublican Thinking and Immigrant Assimilation in and through Colonial Algeria,” French Historical Studies 44:1 (2021), 85-118.

“The Social Logic of Colonial Anti-Judaism: Revisiting the Anti-Jewish Crisis in French Algeria, 1889-1902," Studies in Contemporary Jewry 30 (2018), 17-36.

Teaching

Gender and Law in France, 1870-2022

Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern France 

After Empire: Decolonization and the Remaking of Europe

The Right to the City in Modern Paris: Race, Sexuality, and Capitalism