History Graduate Student wins Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship

For his dissertation, “Domesticating the Médersa: Islamic Education and Colonial Rule in French Northwest Africa.” Congratulations to History graduate student Samuel Anderson, who has been awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship. This is a crowning achievement for Sam, who also received this year a prestigious Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, to add to a list of his research grants that includes a Multi-Regional Research Fellowship from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.His dissertation is entitled  “Domesticating the Médersa: Islamic Education and Colonial Rule in French Northwest Africa.”  Below is an abstract.“Domesticating the Médersa: Islamic Education and Colonial Rule in French Northwest Africa.”This dissertation examines the French médersa, a colonial Islamic school that prepared Muslim subjects in Algeria and West Africa for careers as legal and religious intermediaries in the colonial administration. For over a century, from its foundation in Algeria in 1850 until decolonizationin the 1950s, the médersa served as a tool in the French effort to create a so-called domesticated, official Islam in its African colonies. Anderson’s dissertation focuses on three characteristics of the médersa: its curriculum, which codified Islamic practice according to French, rather than local, priorities; its students, who formed a powerful intermediary class in colonial societies; and its trans-Saharan network that linked Muslim communities in northwest Africa in new ways.