Dr. Rebecca Schloss

Biography

Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss earned her PhD from Duke University in 2003 and joined Texas A&M University where she is an Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. She teaches courses in Atlantic World History, Modern France, and the Caribbean. Her project, Sweet Liberty: Final Days of Slavery in Martinique (2009), focuses on the relationship between Martinique and continental France and examines the construction of racial, class, and gender national identities in the last half of the nineteenth century. Another project, Creating the “Grand Colonial Family”: The Movement of Identity in the French Atlantic, 1815-1830, explores the connections between metropolitan France and its colonies in North America, the broader Caribbean, and West Africa. This research highlights the fluidity of the post-Revolutionary period that created new opportunities for people in existing French Atlantic colonies and investigates how race, class, and gender influenced ideas of national identity in parts of the nineteenth-century French Empire. Additionally, it addresses how changing ideas about race and place during the Napoleonic Wars shaped new understandings of the status of slavery in France’s colonial empire.

Research Interests