Staff Profile

Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus is a Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies. She is a scholar of the 19th and 20th century French and Francophone worlds, with particular research interests in colonial and postcolonial history and theory, intellectual and legal history, and the afterlives of empire. Her work bridges French history, Middle Eastern studies, global history, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies.

Her first book, Experiments in Decolonization: Language in Lebanon After Empire, will be published by Cornell University Press in 2027. It examines how local actors differently constructed the afterlife of empire in Lebanon, a country marked in its language and administration by its experience during Ottoman and French rule. Elizabeth is also at work on a second project about left and right-wing transnational political and cultural activism during the Trente Glorieuses (1945-1975).

Elizabeth received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2017. Before joining Newcastle as a Lecturer, she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, a Mellon Fellow in the Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT. She has held fellowship in Paris, Beirut, Cassis, and her work has been supported by (among others) the Bourse Chateaubriand, the Leverhulme Foundation, the Council for British Research in the Levant, the Mellon Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies at UCL, the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, the Kluge Fellowship and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies.