Carolyn Eichner: Fulbright Research Fellow!

Associate Professor Carolyn Eichner has been awarded a 2022-23 Fulbright Research Fellowship to France (Paris) for her book project The Name: Legitimacy, Identity, and Gendered Citizenship, which analyzes the relationships between personal names, identity, resistance, and state power.

Focusing primarily on France and its empire, the study explores how the modern, imperializing state imposed naming controls, fortifying categories of inclusion and exclusion in order to monitor and regulate its citizens and subjects. It also investigates resistances to the regulation of this both intimate and public aspect of private life, looking specifically at colonial subjects, women, Jews, Muslims, and the aristocracy. The Name traces how governments use naming control to dominate populations. Simultaneously, it shows how people resist control by utilizing the power of naming.