Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories

Miranda Spieler discusses her pioneering biographical study of enslaved people and their struggle for freedom in prerevolutionary Paris, by an award-winning historian of France and the French Empire.

Miranda Spieler is Professor of History and Politics at the American University of Paris. Miranda Spieler is an historian of France and the French overseas empire. Her areas of expertise include  European legal history, slavery and emancipation,  the history of French Guiana and the Caribbean, policing and carceral systems, human rights, and the history of Paris. Spieler's prize-winning first book, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana  (Harvard, 2012), moves between domestic France and colonial soil to chronicle the lives of convicts, ex-convicts, freed slaves, and non-European immigrants. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for Human Values at Princeton University and from the Center for Humanities at Stanford University.

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