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Stanford
Department of History
School of Humanities and Sciences

Rachel Jean-Baptiste

Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professorship in Feminist and Gender Studies
Ph.D., Stanford University
M.A., Stanford University
A.B., Bryn Mawr College

Rachel Jean-Baptiste is a historian of 19th-21st century West and Equatorial Africa and the French-speaking Atlantic World. Her research interests include the histories of: marriage and family law; urbanization; women, gender, and sexuality; colonialism; citizenship; and race. 

Co-President (through 2024) of Coordinating Council for Women in History, an affiliate organization of the American Historical Association.

Board of Directors (through 2025) of African Studies Association. 

UK Editorial Collective, Gender and History.

Editorial Board, Journal of the History of Sexuality

 

Books

Articles/Chapters

Runaway Enslaved Families in Senegal: Mothers, Children, Resistance, and Vulnerabilities, 1857–1903

2025

To Be Worthy of the Name of My Father: Métis, Paternity and Belonging in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Colonial and Postcolonial French Africa and France

2025

Emotional Histories of Relational Rupture

2025

"The Right to my Daughter": African Women, French Men, and Custody of Métis Children in Twentieth-Century French Colonial Africa – Rachel Jean-Baptiste

2021

Love, Marriage, and Families in Africa

2019

‘To Save Eurafrican Children’: Métis Children, African Mothers, and the Reluctant French Colonial Welfare State in post-World War II Senegal

2019

‘The Ancient and The Modern’: Customary and Civil Marriage and Family Law and Gender Equity in Post-Colonial Gabon

2017

"Miss Eurafrica": Men, Women's Sexuality, and Métis Identity in Late Colonial French Africa, 1945-1960

2011

"A Black Girl Should Not be With a White Man": Sex, Race, and African Women's Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900–1946

2010

These Laws Should Be Made By Us: Customary Marriage Law, Codification And Political Authority in Twentieth-Century Colonial Gabon

2008

“The Option of the Judicial Path”: Disputes over Marriage, Divorce, and Extra-Marital Sex in Colonial Courts in Libreville, Gabon (1939-1959)

2007
  

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Field
Subfield
Gender and Sexuality
Legal History
Social History