Gregory Valdespino

Gregory Valdespino head shot

Assistant Professor of History
Email:  [email protected]
Office:  Lowenstein 422

  • Stanford University, BA in History, Minor in Classics, 2013
    University of Chicago, MA in History, 2016
    University of Chicago, PhD in History, 2022
  • Gregory Valdespino is a historian specializing in the urban history of modern Europe and Africa, with a particular in the Francophone world. Trained as a political, social and cultural historian his research explains the changing ways people have defined and accessed their basic needs over the past two centuries. 
      

    He is currently working on his manuscript, "The Politics of Dwelling:  Making Homes in Paris and Dakar in the 20th Century."   This book explains how, over the course of the 20th century, Senegalese urbanites and migrants forged a new set of political demands based on what he calls "the politics of dwelling."  While many histories of modern urbanization focus on the displacement of working class or minorities urbanites, this work argues that the politics of dwelling helps us understand not only why certain  people are forced to leave but also why others remain where they supposedly do not belong. He does this by comparing how certain West African workers in Paris and Dakar came to expect and receive housing funded by the French government by the middle of the 20th century. Rather than end when the empire collapsed, he argues that the colonial politics of dwelling created homes that residents transformed in ways that allowed them to remain in increasingly exclusive and expensive cities. 

    He is also beginning a new project on what he calls "neocolonial urbanism." This work will explain why French grocery stores, construction comapnies, and shipping conglomerates in the capital cities of former French colonies seemed to become more common after the French flag no longer flew over these cities. At the same time, these growing multinationals used funds made overseas to transform urban lives and landscapes in postwar France as part of the country's rapid "modernization". This project will place these transformations together by studying cities in France, West Africa, and Oceania to explain how private companies structured ongoing struggles over personal and political sovereignty throughout the 20th century.

  • -“‘The Cité is Yours’: Colonial Modernization and Dakar’s Postcolonial Suburban
         Dream,” Journal of Urban History, 51(4), 2024: 853-878.

    -  “Beyond Belonging: Rethinking Domestic Space in Imperial Histories” H-France Salon, Vol.
        16, Issue 1, #4 (2024): 1-10.

    - “Senegal’s Elites Wanted to Trash Democracy. Voters Didn’t” Jacobin, March 23, 2024.

     - “‘In His Eyes I am Foreign to France’: Migration and Repatriation between France and
        Senegal, 1858-1911.” French Colonial History vol. 21, 2023: 75-102.

    -  “How France Has Continued Exploiting its Former Colonies.” Jacobin, December 3, 2023.

    - “Modernizing Migrants: Welfare and the Postwar Transformation of Marseille’s African
       Communities” in The Colonial Politics of Population: Fertility, Family and Social Welfare
       between France and Empire    , Edited by Margaret Andersen and Melissa Byrnes (London:
       Palgrave Macmillan, 2023): 183-206.

    - “Plague, Housing, and Battles Over Segregation in Dakar, 1914.” in Epidemic Urbanism:
       Contagious Diseases in Global Cities    , Editors Mohammad Gharipour and Caitlin DeClercq,
       Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2021: 297-304.

  • Gregory Valdespino's CV