Robin, Marie

Marie Robin is a doctoral candidate in the history department, focusing on the 20^th-century French Empire, with an emphasis on North Africa and Southeast Asia. Using an assemblage of French, Arabic, and Vietnamese archival, visual, literary and oral sources, her dissertation investigates the French military’s administration and regulation of soldiers’ sexuality during its two major wars of decolonization —Vietnam and Algeria (c. 1940-1960s). It centers on the Bordel Militaire de Campagne (BMC), a transcolonial covert and ubiquitous network of state-sponsored brothels that relied on the sexual labor of thousands of North African and Vietnamese women and underage girls, situating this system within its broader political, legal, racial, and gendered stakes as well as its lived realities. The dissertation then analyzes how sexual violence became a deeply politicized issue for both the French state and nationalist movements, while foregrounding the sustained legal mobilization of women claimants seeking redress—thereby challenging the assumption that such violence inevitably produced silence.

Experience

Marie’s research has been supported by the American Historical Association, the Journal of Women’s History, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Alliance Doctoral Mobility Grant, the Association for Documentary Editing and various grants from Columbia university.

Her publications include “A Constant Influx of Men, Day and Night: Sex Trafficking and French Military Prostitution during the First Vietnam War (1946–54)” in Histories of Sex Work Around the World (Routledge, 2024). She is currently revising an article on French military brothels accepted for French Historical Studies and has a forthcoming chapter in French on war rape in Indochina, “Le viol pendant la guerre d’Indochine: Enjeux Politiques, Impunité, et Résilience Féminines,” in Indochine, 1945–54: Silences, Expériences et Logiques de Violence" (edited C. Goscha).

Before coming to Columbia, Marie earned her BA in History and Middle-Eastern Studies, graduating summa cum laude from the American University of Paris (2017) and her MA in History from Durham University (2018).