Episode 69 - Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus

The University as a Global Microcosm

Theme: Knowledge, Epistemes, Universities

Published: 16 February 2026

Summary
Elizabeth Marcus, lecturer in French and Francophone studies and a former SCAS Fellow, discusses her research on the global university, linking empire, education and mobility. Focusing on the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, she traces how this international student campus (founded in 1921) functioned as a hub for postwar intellectual exchange, colonial connections and political mobilisation across diverse communities. Marcus argues such sites helped sustain French influence by training future elites, shaped knowledge production, and hosted varied movements from Negritude to 1968-era protests. She contrasts mid‑century openness with contemporary threats: neoliberal consumer culture, restricted student mobility, political backlash against campus activism, and pressures on academic freedom. Marcus praises the interdisciplinary fellowship model of SCAS for enabling reflective, risk‑tolerant scholarship and collaborative global research networks today.

Keywords
Global university, Cité U, empire and education, knowledge production, academic freedom

Suggested Link/s
SCAS Page: Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus

Transcript of the Episode

Elizabeth Marcus 00:10
So the work that I've been doing here is trying to tell this story of this global laboratory, if you like. What new orders of knowledge, fields of action and cultural imaginaries are produced. Ultimately, what I think I want to show with this book is this, this Cité U came to represent and act as a hub of a global life of a city, an early locus of global migration, and perhaps one of the first sites in which we can trace the longer history of the global university.

Natalie von der Lehr 00:47
Welcome to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode, I talked to Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus. She's a lecturer in French and Francophone studies at Newcastle University in the UK, and she was a fellow at SCAS during the academic year of 2024/2025. Elizabeth Marcus is a scholar of the 19th and 20th century French and Francophone worlds with particular research interest in colonial and post colonial history and theory, intellectual and legal history and the afterlives of the Empire. We will talk about some of her recent and ongoing work in this episode, which is the third episode in our theme "Knowledge, Epistemes, Universities".

Natalie von der Lehr 01:30
Very welcome to SCAS Talks and the studio.

Elizabeth Marcus 01:33
Thank you very much.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:34
Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?

Elizabeth Marcus 01:38
Certainly, so as you can tell from my accent, I was brought up in the UK, and I did my undergraduate in French and History. And during that time, in the third year of my undergraduate degree at Oxford, I spent a year in Paris at Sciences Po where I did an international diploma in political science. And we're going to get on to talking later in the podcast about student mobility. So I thought it would be worth mentioning some of that international experience here. I then moved to the US to complete my PhD at Columbia University, and after that time, I taught at MIT for a year, and then moved to Stanford University for two years, where I was a postdoc in the Mellon program for Humanities. I moved back to the UK just before covid, to begin another postdoc, and then took up my current position at Newcastle in French and Francophone studies a few years ago.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:27
So you have been around a bit.

Elizabeth Marcus 02:28
Right, exactly, and I'm here with great pleasure.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:31
Very nice to have you here. To start this off very briefly. What is your research about?

Elizabeth Marcus 02:35
I'm a scholar of comparative post colonialisms of the global French world. So in particular, I'm interested in the long shadows of colonialism and how it works differently across spaces, times, periods and imaginaries. Most of all, I'm interested in how people conceptualize the afterlife of empire differently. I'm particularly interested in the second half of the 20th century and this vast and exciting moment of transformation and transition, these messy and uncertain times when individual lives are upended by huge structural changes. So in my first book, I think about the insoluble connectedness between France and the Arab world from within, and that site is Lebanon, and we'll get onto that in a second. And then in my second project, I moved to another regional site, namely Paris, to understand the radical politics of outsiders, so to speak, to tackle France on their own terms. Now, at its most broad sense, I'm particularly interested in the varied histories of the afterlives of the entanglements of empire and education and the formation of knowledge. And in that interest, I pay particular attention to the more unexpected stories of these afterlives of empires, the more untold tales and the lesser known characters within it.

Natalie von der Lehr 03:57
How come you got interested in this research area to start off with?

Elizabeth Marcus 04:00
So I think there are two answers. One is perhaps more professional. The other is more personal. And I'll start with a more personal one. I think I was initially drawn to this area of study because my family are from Egypt and Syria. They're Francophone and Arabophone, and they came to the UK in the late 1950s. I have family across the world, and our only common language, if you like, is both French and Arabic, even though we're all in rather different places now. And I've always been interested in tracing this story, both in terms of its movement, but also, how is it that in the 20th century, Egyptians and Syrians were educated in French? What's the story of this connection between France and the Arab world? And originally I thought I would work on Francophone Algeria. I completed my MA thesis on the naturalization of Algerian Jews and as French citizens when Algeria was occupied by the French for just over 130 years. And as I was working on Algeria, as I was doing my MA thesis at Columbia, I realized that my field of Francophone Studies has a large number of lacunae when it comes to other parts of the French colonial and post colonial world. In a way, Algeria has come to dominate the field as a rather paradigmatic case study of French imperialism. So I spent a few years studying Arabic both at Columbia, and also spent time in Palestine and Syria on Arabic language courses. And this confirmed my interest in working between and with these two languages. And that is where my interest in Lebanon began, which has a rather different colonial story from that of Algeria. And one thing I found particularly compelling is that it has a long history of a relationship with France that started well before the French were formally involved in Lebanon just after the First World War, as the start of the mandate system. But it also has and maintains a long standing relationship with France now. Lebanon was one of the first states in the European imperial world actually, to gain independence. And so in my work, I consider Lebanon as a kind of case study of an experiment in decolonization. What was decolonization? How might one conceive of it, both for the former empire and, of course, for former colonized subjects?

Natalie von der Lehr 06:17
Let's dive a little bit more into your research, then. You already mentioned your first book about Lebanon. Could you tell our listeners a little bit more about this project and what you did there?

Elizabeth Marcus 06:27
My book experiments in decolonization. "Lebanon and the Culture Wars" is about debates that unfolded over language, French and Arabic, as a space to decolonize, and it tells a larger story about the redistribution and flow of knowledge and power between France, Lebanon and the wider Arab world. In particular and across each chapter of the book, I trace fraught and rather exciting articulations over language and inheritance across different disciplines and professional fields, such as the law, social science and literature. And I show that across these fields, local and international actors are struggling rather differently around the question of inheritance and how they manage that inheritance. So what I think is rather important is that in this story, I tell about post imperial Lebanon, the actors I follow or the characters I look at are not passive subjects in these conversations around change and continuity. A lot of them are thinking about the ongoing production and life of knowledge in the post colonial period, and they are active participants in that reconstruction. One of the things that I found so exciting when I started this work is that local actors are responding very differently to the management of this inheritance. One of the things that I learned in the conclusions to this book is that I want to reveal the more gray areas of decolonization. I want to situate it as a rather joint and uneven project undertaken by different actors in rather different ways, as they sought different means to wash away or hold on to the production of knowledge and the practice of sovereignty. What that, I think, led me to conclude is that decolonization looks rather different than the stories of national piety have led us to believe, rather than the traditional tales of revolutionary hope, often followed by disillusionment, we find a different story, a story of inter societal wrangling, strange bedfellows, unexpected alliances, and certainly rather conservative practices of decolonization.

Natalie von der Lehr 08:44
Let's move then to your current project, which is on France's global university. Tell us more.

Elizabeth Marcus 08:51
So the reason why I became interested in this, and I'll give it a small background, is while I was working on my research in Lebanon, I interviewed a number of Lebanese activists, academics, writers of a certain generation who were active in the 60s and 70s. And what I found is that many of them had studied in France, or at least abroad, but many of them had studied in Paris, even. They had not exclusively, but many of them went to France, were attracted to France by the transformation of the social sciences that were happening in Europe, and particularly in France. And while I was looking at these students, or at least their time as students and their academic trajectories, I realized that they all lived in one place. They all lived at somewhere called the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, which is an international student residence in the 13th arrondissement in Paris. So it got me thinking about this residence, what is it? When was it founded? What were its ideals, and what was the student experience of this place? So I'll give you a little bit of background to this site. It's it's colloquially named the Cité U, and it was conceived in 1921 by the Chancellor of the University of Paris. And as Europe reeled from the devastation of the First World War, the chancellor wanted to build something to serve the generation that had suffered the most during the war, Europe's youth. And he came up with the idea of an international student campus where this new generation of youth would be able to come together to build a future of peace and cooperation through a networked and rather socially conditioned environment of living together, but also committed to French and Francophone educational practices. This rather famed modernist site, it was built in part by the architect Le Corbusier, was modeled on the internationalization of education. And each house that was built over the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and so on, was sponsored by a different nation. So the Maison du Liban, the Maison de Argentine for example, the Moroccan house, the Cambodian house, the American house, for example, and the Cité U was used by students both across France but also across the world, who came to live on this campus, and who would take courses of study in one of the city's many universities. But one of the things that I think is worth emphasizing is that it wasn't simply a dormitory. The campus throbbed with its own experiments in literature, art, activism, politics. Rather famously, Jean Paul Sartre met Simon De Beauvoir on campus, and he lectured there until his death. It was the first stop for black intellectuals from across the French Empire, like earlier Paul Senghor and Aimé Cesaire, who were both founders of the negretude movement. Brazilian future photographer Sebastio Salgado first practiced his trade while exploring this modernist site, and rather intriguingly, the Khmer Rouge first met many of their members on this site, and they also hid weapons on this campus. So it was this huge and extremely vibrant place. To give you an idea of numbers, by 1945 around 3000 students from across the European colonial and post colonial world were living there. Now, what I think is worth bringing up as this, this site was both a an exciting place for all sorts of people, for Algerian nationalists, for Iranian royalists, for Greek authoritarianisms. So in a way, it both represents the kind of political extremism of this time of the post, and my particular interest of the post 45-period. One of the things that I found quite exciting when doing research on this site is that I was expecting 1968 to be a huge moment on this campus. And of course, it was. But it wasn't only 1968 there was a huge moment. These students were paying attention to global causes and concerns elsewhere. So in a way, what it reminds us is that global students are often living through different rhythms, and aren't necessarily living through the rhythms of European and europeanised events. So students were paying attention to the Indochina wars of the 40s and 50s, the Algerian war of independence of the 50s and 60s, the 1967 Arab defeat, and the Greek military dictatorship of the 60s and 70s. So there were a huge number of causes that mobilized these students, not simply the Franco-French cause or interest of 1968. So the work that I've been doing here is trying to tell this story of this global laboratory, if you like. And I ask about what happens when Cambodians live alongside Germans, what new orders of knowledge, fields of action and cultural imaginaries are produced? Ultimately, what I think I want to show with this book is this, this Cité U came to represent and act as a hub of a global life of a city, an early locus of global migration, and perhaps one of the first sites in which we can trace the longer history of the global university.

Natalie von der Lehr 14:19
So what's the link you're making then, between the global university and the story of empire and education?

Elizabeth Marcus 14:26
In my particular context of the Cité U, one of the objectives of the administrators was to center France and Paris in particular as being or as maintaining power in what was increasingly becoming a rather different world where European powers were losing their access to their former imperial conquests and the revising or the recreation of how this power is constituted is part of this global university story. Something worth mentioning is that France was in competition with the US and the USSR for the new generation of post colonial elites, and for who gets to train them and where and the influence that they might have on their long term political and ideological trajectories. So if France, the Cité U is part of this of course, attracts the leaders of all the future leaders of these soon to be ex-colonies or ex-colonies, then they will be able to maintain their spread and influence and their French and indeed Francophone influence across boundaries, even if they're no longer controlling these places. So it is part of the long story of the importance of education to the Imperial project, and what happens when you are no longer in control of these institutions that you've been in control of for, say, 100 or a number of several decades, what happens when you bring students to you and you still might participate in the long term histories and futures of these countries that used to be part of your empire. I think it's important to think about the internationalization, or the globalization of education as part of this entanglement of empire and education to help us to think about the perhaps darker sides of this internationalization of education. It's especially important in a time where traditionally bounded, locally bounded universities, say from NYU to UCL to the Sorbonne are setting up shop across the world. Several of these global centers are struggling today or are unable to fulfill certain commitments to workers' rights, among other problems that they are experiencing. But they are, in a way, a new generation of taking education externally to new places that might not have traditionally been part of the Imperial conquest, but all the same a part of the spread and diffusion of European values around education and European knowledge.

Natalie von der Lehr 17:30
Yes, in what way can you connect your research about these global universities to current times?

Elizabeth Marcus 17:38
So we are living in a rather different period than the one that I was describing in 1950s Lebanon in 1940s and 50s, 60s Paris. Today, the modern university, as our listeners are very aware, is at risk from threats to funding attacks on its ideals and distrust in humanistic knowledge. This illiberal backlash has led to the contraction of the universities. It's led to, of course, the removal of an entire generation of graduate students, hiring freezes. So I suppose the question to ask ourselves is, what is the future of global institutions in this growing age of suspicion of globalization and a sustained rise of popular nationalism? How do we negotiate our desires for a connected world over a growing call for national interest? Now my concern, of course, is that I we don't want to over romanticize the global university as being a site that helps resolve these problems. Indeed, its very fragility is part of the story that we're telling. Its entanglement with the stories of empire and education is part of a very critical history of how the globalization of education has contributed both to the spread of globalization, but also the spread of nationalism. Now, one of the things that I think my research can help us think about is the responses to 1968 in the university setting. So, for example, after 1968 and the student uprising from 1968, universities became and administrators became very scared. One of the lessons that was learned of 1968 is that you have to take the fight to the university. You have to target the university. And the lessons of 68 for the right wing was that we are fighting a battle of ideas, and one way of fighting this is to move into the universities. So there was a huge amount of money that was placed in the universities, chairs that were founded, departments of economics, of law, an attempt to, if you like, capture the university, capture institutions and the right wing are very good at creating institutions. They put a huge amount of money into institutions to do so. And one of the lessons of 68 was that the university is a site for, if you like, denaturizing radical politics, and it needs to be a site for this. We see in recent protests over the last couple of years over Gaza that this could be considered a new 68 moment, not necessarily because these student protests are able to achieve anything, but because of the reaction, the virulent reaction against these student protests, both in terms of the administrators themselves of these universities, and the politicians responses to them. They are creating this new hellscape in which the assumption is that we need to dampen the power of freedom and freedom of expression on these campuses to create radical politics. So the university, if you like, remains the site for the both left and right, but mostly the right to control.

Natalie von der Lehr 21:02
Yes, exactly. I was actually also thinking about the student protests on Gaza and so on. Which are, I think, going on in most countries all over the world.

Elizabeth Marcus 21:13
Certainly.

Natalie von der Lehr 21:14
You mentioned in the beginning you wanted to get a little bit more into mobility. Do you have any more thoughts on that?

Elizabeth Marcus 21:20
So one of the things that I think is worth thinking about in terms of the difference between my periods that I'm looking at and today is that the internationalization, or indeed the globalization of education, is predicated on freedom of movement, namely, for a particular category of person, the student or the intellectual migrant. Now, recent events - Brexit, or the discouragement or the disallowing of student visas, or, of course, the focusing on international students, the focusing on arrests of international students in the US that we've seen today, has shown us that this movement is not only fragile and uneven, but it's not available to everyone. And the world is increasingly shutting its doors to migration, of course, and that includes the international student. So rather than celebrating the global university as this outlier of mobility and educational exchange, what we're seeing today is the closing of those opportunities for mobility and for people to move within different educational systems and geographic spaces and linguistic environments, to share ideas across borders and boundaries. The rise of the international student that took place, or, if you like, was a vast character, an important character of the mid-century is no longer going to remain the prevalent part of educational practice as we move forward.

Natalie von der Lehr 22:54
Is there anything that you would like to add?

Elizabeth Marcus 22:57
One of the things that has become a key pressure point in universities, both for teaching in the classroom and outside of the classroom, is the extent to which the student should have a voice. In the 80s and 90s, the neoliberalization of the university led to the consideration of the student as a consumer. One of the things that I have also been seeing in my work on the Cité U, is that this becomes a concern for the administration. The administrators of the Cité U, they're like, you know, our students have become consumers. They don't care about our original ideological project of utopian humanism. They just want to choose classes, live here and move on. They're not that interested or invested in these ideals, and they add neither are they. These conversations are happening everywhere. Now the idea of the student as consumer means that the student voice or the student's level of comfort has become important. This has led, of course, in recent years, to the what's often been called, perhaps disparagingly, cancel culture or trigger warnings as part of this move, right. We have to make students comfortable in the classroom. If you think about students as consumers, and they don't like something, if they don't like something, the anxiety is that they'll leave or they'll choose another institution. And so if the student deserves to be comfortable, then the university is going to be redesigned around that. Now this has obviously been used by the left and the right, and one of the questions that we have to ask ourselves is the university about comfort or discomfort, because we can't have it both ways. And I think what we have now is a system by which students, some students views count and comfort count, and others don't, but it's rather inconsistent. And so what we're seeing in our current moment, at least in America, is the privileging of some students comfort over others, and those students comforts that serve the material and political conditions of the university and the administration themselves, but while ignoring other comforts. And in a way, there's a really fascinating and disingenuous consideration of the both the responsibility towards the students, but of course, the impact that that has on academic freedom and the freedom of these institutions to practice without considering or thinking about these consumer cultures of student life.

Natalie von der Lehr 25:34
You're currently a scholar here at SCAS. What is your experience of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment so far?

Elizabeth Marcus 25:42
It's worth saying first of all that it's been such a privilege to be here. The range of fellows and scholars, regarding their backgrounds, their disciplines and ages, has meant that I've been able to participate in a very vibrant social and intellectual world for this last year. This is an institution that has allowed a huge amount of freedom in terms of how you spend your time, what you produce, and the work that you are allowed to do while here. One of the things that is in our day and age is that in a moment where the traditional structures of universities aren't able to give academics and faculty the freedom to both explore, to make mistakes and to enjoy other people's work can only take place in these alternative sites that provide you with the comfort and lack of pressure, both political and temporal, that our jobs in universities are unable to provide for us. So it's been a true joy to be part of this environment. One of the things I have learned over the years is that my research and thinking only improves in conversation with people outside of my field. The kinds of questions I ask of my subject area, the work I'm able to do, or think I'm able to do, is revised entirely by my interactions with those who would attempt or approach the material that I'm looking at and in very different conceptual and disciplinary ways. So it has enabled me and enables me to ask a range of questions about my work that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to conceive had I not been part of this environment.

Natalie von der Lehr 27:46
Thank you very much for joining me here in the studio.

Elizabeth Marcus 27:50
Thank you.

Natalie von der Lehr 27:51
And our listeners, of course.

Natalie von der Lehr 27:54
And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In this episode, I have talked to Elizabeth Marcus, Lecturer in French and Francophone studies at Newcastle University in the UK, and fellow at SCAS during the academic year of 2024/2025. And we have talked about her research on the global university and the link to empire and education. This was the third episode in our theme "Knowledge, Epistemes, Universities". In the previous episodes within this theme, we have heard Johan Östling, Professor of History at Lund University, and Director of the Lund Center of the History of Knowledge on "The university as a history of knowledge". And we've also heard Linda Wedlin, Professor of Business studies at Uppsala University and Program Director for the multidisciplinary research program "Democracy and Higher Education", on "A governance dimension on academic freedom". These are episodes number 64 and 67 respectively. If you are interested in the topic of academic freedom, you might also want to listen to our recent SCAS Talks Spotlight featuring voices and reflection from the event "A week on academic freedom" held in Uppsala in autumn 2025. SCAS talks features a broad variety of topics, which is a reflection of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment at the collegium. We are sure that there is something of interest for everyone. Tune in, find your favorite topic or surprise yourself with something new. And as always, we are very happy if you can recommend SCAS Talks to your colleagues and friends. Subscribe to us and you won't miss any new content. SCAS Talks is available on Podbean, Apple podcast, Spotify and mouse podcast apps. I would like to thank Elizabeth Marcus once again for talking to me, and thanks to you for listening. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai