Student research/news

Nimisha Barton is a fourth-year graduate student in the History Department studying the role of French and immigrant women in the process of acculturation within immigrant communities of interwar Paris. This past summer, a research grant from the Program in the Study of Women and Gender enabled her to conduct research in Paris at the National Archives, the Multimedia Resource Center at the Ministère de la Santé et des Sports, and the Archives of the Prefect of Police. Using decree-laws, interministerial circulars, police reports, and naturalization files culled from these three archives, she has written a paper examining the impact of gender politics on immigration policies and naturalization processes in interwar Paris to be presented at the Society for French Historical Studies’ annual conference in February 2011. Barton returns to research in Paris for the 2010-2011 academic year as a visiting student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

The photo BELOW is from a book written in 1932 by Georges Mauco entitled Les Etrangers en France, or Foreigners in France. The caption reads, "Gathering around the sole water source by a foreign colony in the Parisian suburb." It shows poor, harried immigrant women caring for their multiple young children amidst an urban wasteland.