Education

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
B.A., Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges

Research

- Modern France and French empire
- Modern Europe
- Algeria and North Africa
- Comparative empires
- Cultural history
- Visual and material cultures

Biography

Jennifer Sessions is Associate Professor of History. She is a historian of modern France and its colonial empire, with an emphasis on French relations with North Africa, particularly Algeria, and interests in comparative empires, settler colonialism, and cultural history. The French Colonial Historical Society awarded Sessions the Philip and Mary Alice Boucher Prize for her first book, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2011). She is currently working on two projects about French settler colonialism in Algeria: a microhistory of a 1901 revolt by Muslim Algerian colonial subjects in the colonial village of Margueritte and a study of the French equestrian statue that stood in the center of Algiers from 1845 to the end of the colonial period.

Sessions’s research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and she has held fellowships at the John W. Kluge Center for Scholars and the Institut d’Etudes Avancées de Paris. She served as president of the French Colonial Historical Society from 2016 to 2018. Before joining the faculty at UVA in 2018, Sessions taught at the University of Iowa.