Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus
Fellow, SCAS
Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies, Newcastle University

Photo: Mikael Wallerstedt
Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus is a Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at Newcastle University (UK). She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2017. Before joining Newcastle as a Lecturer, she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, a Mellon Fellow of Scholars in the Humanities program at Stanford University, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT.
Elizabeth Marcus is a scholar of the 19th and 20th century French and Francophone worlds, with particular research interests in colonial and postcolonial history and theory, intellectual and legal history, and the afterlives of empire. Her work spans French history, Middle Eastern studies, global history, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies. Her first book, Experiments in Decolonization: Lebanon and the Afterlives of Empire, examines how local actors differently constructed the afterlife of empire in Lebanon, a country whose language and administration are marked by the experience of Ottoman and French rule.
While at SCAS, she will be at work on her second monograph, France’s Global University: Education, Empire and Transnational Entanglements. This book examines left and right-wing transnational political and cultural activism during the Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975) at the Cité international universitaire de Paris, a residential campus built in the spirit of international humanism in the wake of the First World War. During this thirty-year period, the Cité U was more than a simple dormitory; it came to represent and function as a hub of the city’s global life, an early locus of global migration, and a new model of global education. This interdisciplinary project brings to light unexpected connections between social anthropology, postcolonial studies, and global and cultural history, and offers a new window on the post-war and post-colonial moment. France’s Global University ultimately shows how a hybrid group of migrants led to the production of new orders of knowledge, fields of action and cultural imaginaries in the mid-century period.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.