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Dr. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

Dr. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

Professor, History Department


Dr. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

Professor of History

Prof. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall earned a B.A. in intellectual history and political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history from Stanford University. Before coming to CSUSM, she was Lucius N. Littauer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2000, Prof. Sepinwall was one of thirty early-career scholars selected to participate in the International Seminar on the Atlantic World at Harvard University. Her research specialities include the French and Haitian Revolutions, modern Haitian history, French colonialism, Slavery and Film, French-Jewish history and the history of gender. Her books include The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (UC Press, 2005) and Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012).

Sepinwall has served on committees of the American Historical Association, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, French Colonial Historical Society, Society for French Historical Studies, Western Jewish Studies Association and Western Society for French History, and as a member of the editorial board of French Historical Studies.  She currently serves on the Advisory Board for H-France's Fiction and Film for French Historians. She is a past winner of CSUSM’s Harry E. Brakebill Outstanding Professor Award (the university’s top honor for faculty), as well as of the CSUSM President's Award for Innovation in Teaching.  

Education

B.A. in History and Political Science, University of Pennsylvania (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude)

M.A. in History, Stanford University

Ph.D. in History and Jewish Studies, Stanford University

Research

18th/19th Century France, Haiti, Film, Colonialism, Slavery and Memory, Jewish, Gender

Selected Research: Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012); The Abbe Gregoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Univ. of California Press, 2005); “Black Lives Matter in History Too: Slavery, Memory and the Haitian Revolution in Chris Rock’s Top Five,” Journal of American Culture 41, no. 1 (March 2018); “Beyond The Black Jacobins: Haitian Revolution Historiography Comes of Age,” Journal of Haitian Studies 23, no. 1 (Spring 2017), “Still Unthinkable? The Haitian Revolution and the Reception of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past,” Journal of Haitian Studies 19, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 75 – 103; "Robespierre, Old Regime Feminist:  Gender, the Late Eighteenth Century and the French Revolution Revisited," in Journal of Modern History 82, no. 1 (March 2010):  1 – 29; “Addressing Current Events in the World History Classroom,” World History Connected 15, no. 2 (June 2018).

Prof. Sepinwall's research focuses on the late 18th and early 19th centuries, particularly in France and Haiti.  Her scholarship focuses on the origins of modern thinking about difference, whether religious, racial, linguistic or gender.  Past projects include the French revolutionary priest and abolitionist Henri Grégoire; the impact of the Haitian Revolution in the United States and France; a comparative analysis of slavery, race and memory in the United States and France; debates about gender in Enlightenment and revolutionary France; Atlantic Revolutions; Napoleon and the Jews; new ideas of biography; teaching France in world history; and representations of colonialism, slavery and universalism in French film. She is current writing about depictions of the Haitian Revolution in cinema and other multimedia forms.

Publications:

BOOKS

  • Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012).
  • The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (University of California Press, 2005); translated as L'abbé Grégoire et la Révolution française :  les origines de l'universalisme moderne (Bécherel :  Éditions Les Perséides, 2008).

SELECTED JOURNAL ARTICLES, BOOK CHAPTERS AND ESSAYS

(more available at my Academia.edu page)

  • “Addressing Current Events in the World History Classroom,” World History Connected 15, no. 2 (June 2018), http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/15.2/sepinwall.html.

  • “Black Lives Matter in History Too: Slavery, Memory and the Haitian Revolution in Chris Rock’s Top Five,” Journal of American Culture 41, no. 1 (March 2018) [special issue on U.S. Slavery in the Popular Imagination], 5-16.

  • “Beyond The Black Jacobins: Haitian Revolution Historiography Comes of Age,” Journal of Haitian Studies 23, no. 1 (Spring 2017), 4 - 34.
  • “New Directions in French Holocaust Film: The Origin of Violence, Once in a Lifetime, and Victor Young Perez,” Fiction and Film for French Historians: A Cultural Bulletin 7, no. 2 (Jan. 2017), https://h-france.net/fffh/classics/new-directions-in-french-holocaust-film-the-origin-of-violence-once-in-a-lifetime-and-victor-young-perez/.
  • “Why Audiences Must See Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation, Despite the Controversy,” History News Network (Oct. 13, 2016), https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164115.
  • “Never Again?  Reflections on Interviewing Elie Wiesel in 2007,” History News Network (July 31, 2016), https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163482/. 
  • “Reimagining Jewish-Muslim Relations on Screen:  French-Jewish Filmmakers and the Middle East Conflict,” in Zvi Jonathan Kaplan and Nadia Malinovich, eds., The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 302 – 322.
  • “Jewish-Muslim Romance, With a French Twist: Jean-Jacques Zilbermann’s He’s My Girl,” Fiction and Film for French Historians: A Cultural Bulletin 6, no. 6 (April 2016), available at https://h-france.net/fffh/maybe-missed/jewish-muslim-romance-with-a-french-twist-jean-jacques-zilbermanns-hes-my-girl/.   
  • “History is Too Important to Leave to Hollywood:  Colonialism, Genocide, and Memory in the Films of Raoul Peck,” in Toni Pressley-Sanon and Sophie Saint-Just, eds., Raoul Peck:  Power, Politics and the Cinematic Imagination (Lanham, MD: Lexington/Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 13 - 36.
  • “Lumières et esclavages [Débat Gainot/Dorigny/Ehrard/ Sepinwall],” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 380 (juin 2015): 149 - 169.
  • “Sexuality, Orthodoxy and Modernity in France:  North African Jewish Immigrants in Karin Albou’s La Petite Jérusalem,” in Lawrence Baron, ed., Modern Jewish Experiences in World Cinema (Waltham, MA:  Brandeis University Press, 2011), 340 – 347.
  • “If This is a Woman:  Evelyne Trouillot’s The Infamous Rosalie and the Lost Stories of New World Slavery,” Fiction and Film for French Historians: A Cultural Bulletin 5, no. 4 (February 2015), available at https://h-france.net/fffh/classics/if-this-is-a-woman-evelyne-trouillots-the-infamous-rosalie-and-the-lost-stories-of-new-world-slavery/.
  • “Still Unthinkable? The Haitian Revolution and the Reception of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past,” Journal of Haitian Studies 19, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 75 – 103.
  •  “Happy as a Slave: The Haitian Revolution, French Style” [review essay on Philippe Niang’s Toussaint Louverture miniseries], Fiction and Film for French Historians: A Cultural Bulletin, vol. 4, no. 1 (October 2013), available at https://h-france.net/fffh/maybe-missed/happy-as-a-slave-the-toussaint-louverture-miniseries/.
  • “Teaching about Haiti in World History: An Introduction,” World History Connected 10, no. 2 (June 2013), available at http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/10.2/sepinwall.html.
  • Radio Interview on Haitian History and the 2010 Earthquake, Chicago Public Radio, “Worldview” (with host Jerome McDonnell), Jan. 27, 2010 (available at https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/reevaluating-haitian-history/22e1a810-ac4d-4690-a4f4-65706806993e)
  • Co-editor, special issue of the World History Bulletin on France in World History, with Michael G. Vann, vol. XXVI, no. 1 (Spring 2010) [including her article "Is This Tocqueville or George W. Bush:  Teaching French Colonialism in Southern California After 9/11," pp. 18-23].
  • "Robespierre, Old Regime Feminist:  Gender, the Late Eighteenth Century and the French Revolution Revisited," in Journal of Modern History 82, no. 1 (March 2010):  1 - 29.
  • "The Specter of Saint-Domingue:  American and French Reactions to the Haitian Revolution," in The World of the Haitian Revolution, eds. Norman Fiering and David Geggus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
  • "Atlantic Revolutions," in Encyclopedia of the Modern World, ed. Peter Stearns (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008), I: 284-289.
  • "Defining the Nation: The Abbé Grégoire and the Problem of Diversity in the French Revolution," in The Human Tradition in Modern Europe, eds. Cheryl A. Koos and Cora Granata (Lanham, MD:  Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 1-14.What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing With a Priest Like This?  Biography, Jewish Studies, and Gentile Subjects, in AJS Perspectives (Spring 2007): 30-32.
  • "Napoleon, French Jews, and the Idea of Regeneration," in CCAR Journal 54 [special issue on Sanhedrin Bicentennial] (Winter 2007), 55-76.
  • "L'abbé Grégoire and the Metz Contest:  The View from New Documents," in Revue des Études Juives 166, nos. 1-2 (janvier - juin 2007), pp. 273-288.
  • "Atlantic Amnesia: French Historians, the Haitian Revolution and the 2004-6 CAPES Exam," in Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 34 (2006):  300-314 [electronic version available at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/w/wsfh/0642292.0034.019?view=text;rgn=main].
  • "Strategic Friendships:  Jewish Intellectuals, the Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution," in Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture:  From Al-Andalus  to the Haskalah, eds. Adam Sutcliffe and Ross Brann (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004):  189-212.
  • "Eliminating Race, Eliminating Difference: Blacks, Jews, and the Abbé Grégoire," in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, eds. Tyler Stovall and Sue Peabody (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2003): 28-41.
  • "La révolution haïtienne et les États-Unis:  Étude historiographique," in 1802. Rétablissement de l'esclavagedans les colonies françaises: Aux origines de Haïti, eds. Yves Benot and Marcel Dorigny (Paris:  Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003), 387-401.
  • "Les paradoxes de la régénération révolutionnaire:  le cas de l'abbé Grégoire," Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 321 (juillet/septembre 2000):  69-90.

Courses

RECENT COURSES

History 102    World Civilizations, 1500 - present

History 301    Historical Methods and Writing 

History 324    Enlightenment and European Society

History 325    Revolutionary Europe, 1789 - 1989

History 381    Comparative French Colonialism, from the Caribbean to Indochina 

History 382    Travel and Contact in the Early Modern World 

History 383    Women and Jewish History

History 386  Haiti and World History

History 460   Senior Research Seminar in World History

History 513   Graduate History Teaching Practicum

 

 

Vitae

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Recent Refereed Journal Publications

  1. Hadaegh A. R., and Barker K., Enhancing Concurrency Using Multi-versioned Object, (Submitted to Iranian Journal of Science & Technology Journal in February 2005 – Still under review)
  2. Hadaegh A. R., and Barker K., Reconciling Instead of Aborting Unsuccessful Transactions in Multi-version Object-bases, Iranian Journal of Science & Technology Journal, ISSN: 0363-1307 (Accepted in August 2005 – Publication is forthcoming).
  3. Wahlund Thomas M., Hadaegh Ahmad R., Clark Robin, Nguyen Binh, Fanelli Michael, and Read Betsy A. Analysis of Expressed Sequence Tags from Calcifying Cells of the Marine Coccolithophorid, Emiliania huxleyi. Journal of Marine Biotechnology, 6 (3), pp 278-290, May 13, 2004, ISSN: 1436-2228

Recent Refereed Conference Publications

  1. Wang J., and Hadaegh A. R. Recovering the Reconciled Objects. Proceedings of International Advanced Database Conference (IADC 2005), San Diego, California, USA,  pp 49-58, June 27-30, 2005, ISBN:0-9742448-4-8
  2. Perez B., and Hadaegh A. R., Building a Reliable Multiversion object-based system, In Proceeding of Hawaii International Conference on Computer Science (HICCS'04), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, pp 416-421, Jan 2004, (ISSN: 1545-6722)
  3. Rosenthal J, Hadaegh A. R., and Yoshii R.  Conversion of the Computer Aided Instruction to Use Database Connectivity, International Conference of Computer Science and its Applications (ICCSA-2004), San Diego, California, USA, pp 125-134, June 2004, ISBN:0-9742448-1-3
  4. Perez B., and Hadaegh A. R., Recovery in Multiversion Objectbase Systems, The 2003 International Conference on Emerging Technologies (ICET'03), Minneapolis, MN, USA, Aug 2003. Web publication: http://www.rfbinternational.com/august_25.htm.
  5. Fayyazi G., and Hadaegh A. R., Kasraian M, Bluetooth Signposts Providing Road Information to Passing by Vehicles, International Conference of Computer Science and its Applications (ICCSA-2003), San Diego, California, USA, pp 280-286, July 2003, ISBN:0-9742-4480-5.

Extended Refereed Abstract (2 to 3 pages)

  1. Ebert M., Hadaegh A. R., Read B. A., and Wahlund T., Prediction of the Genes in Unicellular Algae Emiliania Huxleyi, International Conference of Computer Science and its Applications (ICCSA-2003), San Diego, California, USA, pp 320-322, July 2003, ISBN:0-9742-4480-5.

Refereed Poster (1 to 2 paragraphs)

  1. Hadaegh, A.R, Ranji, Stairs J, Sun, D.   and Wahlund T and Read B. , CoccoExpress: A Comprehensive Genetic Database for Coccolithophorids,  Conference for Annual Meeting for the Society for the Molecular Biology and Evolution: Genomes, Evolution, and Bioinformatics, (GEB2006) Tempe, AZ, USA, (Accepted in March 2006 - not published yet). 
  2. Wahlund T.,  Hadaegh A. R., Clark R., Fanelli M., and Read B. A.,  Characterization of Complementary DNAs from Expressed Sequence Tag Analysis of the Coccolithophorid Marine Alga, Emiliania Huxleyi, Meeting of the American Society of Microbiology (ASM), Washington, DC, USA,  pp 660, May 2003. Reviewed by the chair of the meeting (Dr. Dauglus Bishop) and the chair elect (Dr. Adam M. Bailis), ISSN: 10602011

Previous Publications

  1. Hadaegh A. R, and Ehikioya S., The Role of Reconciliation in Retrieving Historical Objects in a Multi-version Object-based System, Canadian Conference on  Electrical and  Computer Engineering (CCECE’ 02), Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, ISBN: 0-7803-7514-9; Vol. 3, pp. 1482-1486, August 2002.    
  2. Hadaegh A. R, and Ehikioya S., Using an Optimistic Protocol to Obtain Historical Information in a Multi-Version Object-based System,  The 6th World Multi-conference on Systemic, Cybernetics and Informatics (SCI-2002): Computer Science I, Orlando, Florida, USA, Vol 3, pp 325-329, July 14-18, 2002, ISBN: 980-07-8150-1      
  3. Hadaegh A. R and Barker K., Partial Re-execution: Reconciling Transactions to Increase Concurrency in Object-bases, International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA'99), Monte Carlo Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. ISBN: 1-892512-15-7, Vol 3 page 1469-1475 June 1999.      
  4. Hadaegh A. R., and Barker K., Simple Reconciliation of Transactions to Increase Concurrency in Historical Object-bases, XII Brazilian Symposium on Database Systems - SBBD’97, pp. 44-64, October 1997.    
  5. Hadaegh, A. R., and Barker K., Version Management in Object Based System, Advances in Data Base and Information Systems (ADBIS’96), Moscow, pp. 126 - 133, September 10 -13, 1996.
  6. Peter Graham, Ken Barker, and Ahmad Reza-Hadaegh, Disconnected Objects: Reconciliation in a Nested Object Transaction Environment, Proceedings of the ECOOP'96 Workshop on Mobility and Replication (WMR'96), Linz, Austria, July 1996. Published by Dpunkt Verlag in "Special Issues in Object Oriented Programming", pp. 379-383. (the Workshop Reader for ECOOP'96) 
  7. Hadaegh A. R., Graham P.,  and Barker K., An Architecture and Model for Processing Transactions in Multi-version Object Base Systems, In the Proceedings of the Second Annual Mid-Continent Information Database Systems Conference, Database Research Group, Fargo ND, Volume 2, Fargo, USA, May, 1993, pp 99-112.

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Bioinformatics (Hadaegh A. R., Zhang X., Wahlund T.,  Read B.)

  • Developing an EST database for E. huxleyi that will serve as a repository for ongoing EST sequencing efforts and to facilitate the public dissemination of sequence information once it is deposited in GenBank
  • The development of a Microarray database for E. huxleyi to serve as a storage site for Microarray data from ongoing research and to facilitate the public dissemination of that data once published.
  • The design of an E. huxleyi whole genome oligonucleotide