Dr. Yuval Tal is a historian of modern France and the French colonial Empire in North Africa. His research brings the history of Christians, Muslims, and Jews from across Europe and the Mediterranean into a shared analytical framework. This desegregated method allows him to bridge the divide between national and imperial histories of Europe, and bring into view sublimated ethnic premises and biases that haunt European liberal democracies.
Yuval is currently completing his book manuscript, “The Republic Estranged: Catholics, Muslims, and Jews in Colonial Algeria.” The book shows how interactions in Algeria between Muslims, Catholics, and Jews shaped the making of the French nation-state, and argues that France’s republican project of national assimilation was predicated on the notion that only Catholic Europeans were a priori capable of becoming French.
Yuval is also working on a new research project, “The Limits of Solidarity: Ethnicity and Class Politics in the French Mediterranean, 1918-1962.” This project explores interactions between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish workers in labor unions and during strikes in the Mediterranean cities of Marseille, Algiers, and Constantine.
Yuval received his PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University in 2020 and was a fellow of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in 2021-2.