“North African Studies” at the University of Algiers, 1900–40

My presentation examines the humanities college of the University of Algiers as a center of French North African Studies. A colony of France from 1830 to 1962, Algeria had a special place in France’s colonial empire as the territory most proximate to France and as France’s major European settler colony. The University of Algiers was France’s only full-fledged research and teaching university in its overseas empire with a dual commitment to teaching Algeria’s European population and research on North African in situ. By the 1930s, the humanities college, or Faculté des lettres, became a leading French center for research on North African geography, history, languages, and peoples.

In my presentation, I propose that we consider North African studies at the University of Algiers as a form of area studies avant la lettre. By the start of World War II, the university could claim the following hall marks of area studies: self-consciously multi- and interdisciplinary research centers devoted to contemporary issues in French colonies of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, as well as the Sahara and a cohort of specialists who advised the French government on policy. The primary distinction of area studies as it would develop in the US is that these research endeavors supported French colonial power, rather than US hegemonic power in the Cold War. Considering the Faculté des lettres as a center for ‘area studies’ suggests two ways of reframing area studies in the current moment of crisis. First, more directly acknowledging what the French called “colonial sciences” in the intellectual lineage of area studies and, second, an invitation to look beyond the United States when considering past and present area studies.