Emily Lord Fransee specializes in the study of colonialism, gender, and race in modern European and international history, focusing in particular on France and the francophone world.

Her in-progress book manuscript is a comparative history of women’s right to vote in France and its former colonies. Entitled Without Distinction: Gender and Suffrage in the Postwar French Empire 1944-1974, the book examines how people inside and outside of the colonial administration sought to challenge or maintain the limits of women’s citizenship. Despite the institution of female suffrage in the French metropole at the end of WWII, the subsequent expansion of women’s right to vote across the empire was uneven and irregular. As females and as non-white imperial subjects, such women’s long history of “doubled” exclusion from full citizenship transformed their potential enfranchisement into a test case for the civilizing mission that had long legitimized the French empire. However, the actual enfranchisement of such individuals raised important questions: would giving such women the right to vote in French elections mean that the civilizing mission had “worked” or, conversely, fuel nationalist and anti-colonial arguments that it was never needed to begin with? Using examples from the Antilles, Senegal, Cameroon, Algeria, India, international institutions like the United Nations, and transnational feminist groups, the book goes beyond French metropolitan perspectives to show how politicians and activists across the colonies shaped new conceptions of citizenship, feminism, and sovereignty. This highlights the enduring entanglement of democratic and imperial political systems as well as the importance of both gender and race for understanding European citizenships within a global framework.

Her new research project pivots from a political to a cultural history of gender and race within colonial and postcolonial societies to examine the connections between science fiction and imperialism in the colonial and postcolonial world, showing how colonialism has inspired and inhabited the genre of science fiction and, conversely, how science fiction has helped to mold and give expression to a range of imperialist and anti-colonial ideologies.