Anne-Isabelle is an assistant professor in History at Leiden University, the Netherlands.
Her research interests are European and world history from a transnational and transimperial perspective. She focuses on political, economic and intellectual links between ideas of European, imperial, regional and global construction and belonging from the late nineteenth century onward. She is currently completing a monograph on the influence of colonialism on the European movement in France and the Netherlands, two ‘imperial nation-states’, in the interwar period. In 2017 she started a new project, funded by a Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Veni grant, on ‘Eurafrica. African perspectives, 1917-1970s’. The idea of Eurafrica suggested that Europe and Africa were interdependent and complementary continents. It has generally been examined from European, and particularly French, perspectives, but Anne-Isabelle argues for the need to also analyse how African actors, in particular various civil society actors from West Africa, engaged with, or rejected this idea. This project is situated in her broader research interests at the intersection of European and world history, where she has worked on civil society networks surrounding various international organisations such as the League of Nations and on anti-colonial, European and socialist networks in the post-1945 period.