Gregory Valdespino
Drop-in hours: Wednesdays, 2 - 5 p.m., or by appointment.
Gregory Valdespino is a historian specializing in the history of modern Africa and Europe, with a particular in the Francophone world. Trained as a political, social and cultural historian his research explains the changing ways people have defined and accessed their basic needs over the past two centuries. He earned a PhD in History from the University of Chicago and a BA from Stanford University.
He is currently working on his manuscript, "The Politics of Dwelling: Making Home Between France and Senegal in the 20th Century." This book explains how, over the course of the 20th century, Senegalese urbanites and migrants forged a new set of political demands based on what he calls "the politics of dwelling." People based these demands less on political or categories like "citizen" and more on a growing expectation that French state had to manage or support their domestic well-being. Rather than end when the empire collapsed, he argues that the colonial politics of dwelling shaped political struggles, physical landscapes, and everyday lives in postcolonial France and Senegal. Alongside this work, he is also beginning a new project on the history of European foods and African consumers to explain the relationship between food production, industrial agriculture, and sovereignty before and after decolonization.
His work has appeared in The Journal of Urban History and the journal French Colonial History as well as the edited volumes Epidemic Urbanism: Contagious Diseases in Global Cities (Intellect Books, 2021) and The Colonial Politics of Population: Fertility, Family and Social Welfare between France and Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Committed to public scholarship, he regularly contributes to Jacobin and worked for the history podcast Throughline on their Peabody-winning episode "Afghanistan: The Center of the World."
He has received research support from the Mellon Foundation, the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Education Trust Fellowship, the Princeton Program in African Studies, and the University of Chicago Committee on African Studies.
Professor Valdespino is the recipient of the University of Chicago Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2021).
Publications
Articles
- “Beyond Belonging: Rethinking Domestic Space in Imperial Histories” H-France Salon, Vol. 16. Issue 1, 2024.
- “Senegal’s Elites Wanted to Trash Democracy. Voter’s Didn’t” Jacobin, March 23, 2024.
- “‘The Cité is Yours’: Colonial Modernization and Dakar’s Postcolonial Suburban Dream” Journal of Urban History, 2024.
- “‘In His Eyes I am Foreign to France’: Migration and Repatriation between France and Senegal, 1858-1911.” French Colonial History, vol. 21-22, 2023: 75-102.
- “How France Has Continued Exploiting Its Former African Colonies” Jacobin, December 3, 2023.
- “Modernizing Migrants: Welfare and the Postwar Transformation of Marseille’s African Communities” in The Colonial Politics of Population: Fertility, Family and Social Welfare between France and Empire, Edited by Margaret Andersen and Melissa Byrnes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023): 183-206.
- “Youth and the Contradictory Construction of Europe and Africa: Emily Marker’s Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era” Book review for Toqueville 21 (December 14, 2022)
- “Plague, Housing, and Battles Over Segregation in Dakar, 1914.” in Epidemic Urbanism: Contagious Diseases in Global Cities, Editors Mohammad Gharipour and Caitlin DeClercq, Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2021: 297-304.
- “Le genre des indépendances.” Conference review co-written with Élise Abassade and Nassima Mekaoui-Chebout, 20&21. Revue d’histoire, Numéro 146, avril – juin 2020: 165-168.
- “Broadening Horizons: Graduate Students Dive into Curation at a Community Museum.” Co-written with Misha Appeltova and Zach Nacev, AHA Today, May 3, 2018.
Courses Taught
- Building African Cities: Past and Present
- African Urban History
- Home and Empire: From Little House on the Prairie to Refugee Camps
- African Migration to Europe in Historical Perspectives
- The Sacred City: Paris’s Religious Landscape
- African and African Diaspora
- Europe - Late Modern