Alumni Interview with Professor Elizabeth Jacob (Stanford History PhD, 2022)

Elizabeth Jacob (Stanford PhD, 2022) is Assistant Professor of History at University of Massachusetts- Amherst. A historian of modern West Africa, she works on gender, family, decolonization, pan-Africanism, French-African relations, and global feminisms. Focusing on Côte d’Ivoire, her first book project examines how ideas about African motherhood shape possibilities for women's civic action, and how expectations of civic motherhood change over time. Jacob holds a PhD in History from Stanford University, with a minor in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies and a certificate in African Studies. We chatted with Professor Jacob when she came back to the Farm on  May 1, 2025 to deliver the inaugural FGSS Alumni Lecture co-sponsored by the History Department and the Center for African Studies.

How did you become interested in the history of modern West Africa?

I came to Africa by way of France. Studying French in secondary school made me—an Indian-American woman from Long Island—an unlikely francophile. But when an AP course in European history introduced me to the French Revolution, I became keen to study 19th century French history at the college level.

As it happens, when I arrived at Columbia University as an undergraduate, the French revolutionary historian with whom I had hoped to study was on leave. I looked instead to the department of French & Francophone Studies, albeit with little understanding of the histories embedded in the word “francophone.” Classes with Professors Madeleine Dobie, Kaiama Glover, and Emmanuelle Saada introduced me to the French-speaking worlds that had been absent from my secondary education. As I encountered the brutal histories of French conquest and colonization in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, the republican ideals that had first drawn me to French revolutionary history began to ring hollow. How could France reconcile its promotion of liberty and equality at home with its acts of violence and exploitation overseas? What did it mean to champion fraternity in an empire built on racial hierarchy?

With time, I became much more curious about the French colonial empire than I was about the French “Hexagon.” Luckily for me, Columbia Professors Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Mamadou Diouf, and Gregory Mann were available to guide my early explorations of West African history and literature. Soon, the history of decolonization in francophone West Africa—in which African activists frequently drew on the rhetoric of the French Revolution to challenge the injustices of colonial rule—captured my imagination. I realized that if I really wanted to understand liberty, equality, and fraternity, then West Africa was the place to do it.

Tell us about your book project based on your 2022 dissertation in Stanford History.

My first book project, Changing the Meaning of Motherhood: Gender, Family, and Politics in Côte d’Ivoire, studies the emergence of maternalism as a site of female power and a locus of political contestation in Côte d’Ivoire. Beyond biology, motherhood had long been a source of political authority for women in West African societies. In times of crisis, communities called upon women to invoke their symbolic power as mothers to make moral interventions into community life. Over the course of the twentieth century, motherhood empowered Ivoirian women to make potent political claims, most notably in resistance to colonial rule. But as colonial officials, Christian missionaries, and Ivoirian leaders vied for control against a backdrop of turbulent political change, meanings and expectations of motherhood began to shift. Western notions of female domesticity, promoted in French Christian and colonial schools, proved seductive to African elites looking to consolidate their power. Although they celebrated women for their maternal militancy during the anticolonial movement, they pushed them toward a more bourgeois vision of maternal domesticity in the postcolonial period. Empowered by colonial conceptions of patriarchy, elite actors leveraged motherhood’s changing meanings in order to coopt their militancy. Drawing on colonial archives, oral histories, news media, and cultural production, I show how the political framing of women as mothers both enabled and constrained their political roles in Ivoirian society. While motherhood empowered women to make political claims, it also limited their ability to participate as full citizens in the independent republic.

Do you have a favorite archive or library?

I really enjoy archival work, and I have many happy memories of days spent at libraries and archives across West Africa, Europe, and the United States. The Archives nationales d’Outre-Mer (the colonial branch of the French National Archives) are a particularly comfortable place to conduct research. Aix-en-Provence is a popular tourist destination, and I’ve always felt fortunate to have a professional excuse to spend my summers in southern France, eating fresh produce from the local markets and drinking rosé.

In Rome, the archives of the Sœurs Missionnaires de Notre-Dame des Apôtres (Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of the Apostles) also merit special note. The “archive” isn’t much more than a small room equipped with filing cabinets and a table for visiting readers. But what the space lacks in grandeur, it makes up for in the generosity of its director, the multilingual missionary, medical doctor, and archivist Sister Irini Chenouda. Although these archives now play a relatively minor role in my book manuscript, I will never forget the week I spent in Sister Irini’s company, chatting and sipping espresso during reading breaks.

What texts inspired you the most in your career?

There are so many! I will name just a few. Frederick Cooper’s Citizenship between Empire and Nation was my introduction to the tortuous process of decolonization in French Africa. In the years 1945-60, many political activists in French Africa did not seek emancipation from empire, but rather, greater rights within it. By refusing teleological narratives of the end of empire, which typically framed nation-state independence as a foregone conclusion, the text reminded me to ground my analysis in the words and actions of historical actors—not in my own preconceived ideas about what freedom or revolution should look like.

But Cooper’s work also frustrated me, and that, too, was important for my intellectual development as an early-stage graduate student. Although its cover featured a photograph of Senegalese women voting in elections in 1956, the book itself devoted only a handful of pages to the role of African women in campaigns for political rights within the French empire. A rigorously-sourced study of the first generation of African women to graduate from French colonial schools, Professor Pascale Barthélémy’s Africaines et diplômées à l'époque coloniale inspired me to explore how I might use both colonial archives and oral histories to narrate women’s roles in French West African politics and society.

Finally, while the literary scholar Annette Joseph-Gabriel does not necessarily identify as a historian, I claim her as one. Her book Reimagining Liberation offers a brilliant account of Black women’s visions of decolonial citizenship in the French empire. Texts authored by Black women are rare and prized sources in my research. Joseph-Gabriel’s fine-grained analyses of women’s writings show me how to make the most of what I have.

What are some key things you remember from your time at Stanford?

My favorite memories of Stanford are of its people. I could not have asked for a more supportive doctoral committee than Professors Joel Cabrita, JP Daughton, and Richard Roberts. It’s been three years since I filed my dissertation, and I’m still bothering them with emails every few months. Beyond my committee, courses with Professors Estelle Freedman, Priya Satia, and Matt Sommer broadened my intellectual horizons and inspired me to think about feminism, gender, sexuality, and empire in a global comparative context. In the History department office, Art Palmon solved my problems, Burçak Keskin Kozat encouraged my writing, and Brenda Finkel kept me exceptionally well-fed.

The Center for African Studies was my home away from History. Dr. Laura Hubbard and Brenda Mutuma taught me everything I know about what it means to build a community, intellectual or otherwise.

I was blessed with a wonderful Ph.D. cohort. I count many of them among my closest friends. Every time I hear about one of their new publications, projects, jobs, or initiatives—both within and beyond the academy—I feel a burst of pride. I am so lucky to know them!

How would you advise graduate students who are now training in the African history field? 

Start visiting archives as early and as often as you can. Many African archives have yet to digitize their catalogs, which means that it can be challenging to know what kinds of materials are available before you arrive. Mining the footnotes of other scholars’ publications can give you a sense of what’s possible, but archival accessibility can change over time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve placed requests for documents, only to be informed that the materials were damaged, lost, or possibly stolen (!). Every archive also has its own idiosyncrasies. Although a dedicated archivist can be an invaluable guide, I find it takes me a few days of trial and error before I begin to grasp the logic of a given archival catalog. Sometimes the most tantalizing entries are linked to dossiers that are disorganized, incomplete, or simply irrelevant. On the other hand, more generic descriptions like “Political Affairs, 1949” can yield real archival treasures. The sooner you travel to an archive—whether on the African continent or elsewhere—the sooner you’ll be able to gauge how its materials may shape the scope of your research.