Lecturer: Alice Conklin.

At its opening in 1938, Paris’ Musée de l'Homme made clear its universalist and humanist ambitions. Yet, its collections were all from the French colonial empire…

Alice Conklin teaches History at Ohio University and received a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. She teaches Modern European History with a particular focus upon nineteenth and twentieth-century France and its empire.

Alice Conklin's first book, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997) examined the ways in which France's liberal Third Republic produced a consensus on the legitimacy of imperialism through the notion of a special "mission to civilize." The book won the 1998 Book Prize of the Berskshire Conference of Women's Historians.