Dr. Miranda Spieler

Miranda Spieler is an historian of France and the French colonial world. Her work explores themes relating to extra-legality and emergency power, slavery and its afterlives, legal space and legal personhood. She received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard College in History and Literature and worked as a travel writer (about Paris) during her undergraduate years. She received her PhD in European History from Columbia University, where her advisor was Simon Schama. Before and during her doctoral studies at Columbia, she worked as an assistant to the writer Susan Sontag. Her first book, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), received both the George Mosse Prize and the J. Russell Major Prize from the American Historical Association. In 2013 she left the United States with her daughter, then a toddler, to join the faculty of the American University of Paris, where she is now Professor of History and Politics. Her move to Paris would enable the archival research that informs her new book, Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories (Harvard University Press, 2025). She lives on Paris’s Canal Saint-Martin.