Joshua Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1991 and his B.A. from Brown University in 1983. His research and teaching deal primarily with the history of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but he has also done comparative work on Britain and Germany. His first book, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), examined the emergence of new scientific techniques for understanding population questions in nineteenth-century France, focusing in particular on their connection to changing ideas about the place of women and families in the social order, and their relationship to the state. He is currently writing a book about an episode of anti-Semitic violence in colonial Algeria in 1934.
In 2011-2012 he was a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies