Marie Robin

Marie Robin is a 6th year doctoral candidate in French colonial history at Columbia University. She holds a BA in History and Middle-Eastern Studies from the American University of Paris (2017) and an MA in History from Durham University (2018).

Robin’s dissertation investigates how the French military regulated soldiers’ sexuality during its colonial wars in Vietnam (1946–54) and Algeria (1954–62), revealing the legal, racial, and gendered logics underpinning this system. This regulation operated through the covert institutionalization of state-sponsored mobile military brothels (Bordels Militaires de Campagne, or BMC), which relied on the sexual labor of thousands of North African and Vietnamese women, many of whom were coerced, trafficked, or underage.