Kelly Colvin
Biography
Professor Colvin’s research interests include modern European history, modern French history, women, gender, and sexuality history, and the history of race and empire. She teaches undergraduate courses on each of these subjects, and she has also taught seminars on European fashion, food, and feminism.
Area of Expertise
Modern European History, Modern French History, Women and Gender, Race and Empire
Degrees
PhD, Brown University
AB, Bowdoin College
Professional Publications & Contributions
- Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France (University of Toronto Press, 2023)
- Gender and French Identity after the Second World War, 1944-1954: Engendering Frenchness (Bloomsbury Press, September 2017)
- “‘The Good Couscous That Pleases Us!’: The Meanings of Gendered Imperialist Imagery in Postcolonial French Food Advertising, 1970-2000,” Gender and History (forthcoming, 2025)
- “Brigitte Bardot, Bikini Bodies, and the Bottom Line: Soft Power and the Creation of a Global French Feminine Ideal in the 1950s and 1960s,” in Sylvia Dummer Scheel, Charlotte Faucher, & Camila Gatica Mizala, Eds. Soft Power Beyond the Nation (Georgetown University Press, 2024)
- “A Well-Made Up Woman: Aesthetics and Conformity in Postwar France,” French Historical Studies (Volume 38, Issue 4), October 2015
- “Solidarity or Suspicion: Gender, Enfranchisement, and Popular Culture in Liberation France,” Journal of Women’s History (Volume 24, Issue 2), Summer 2012
Additional Information
Professor Colvin comes to UMass Boston having received her PhD at Brown University and taught at several institutions, including Brown, University of Maryland, and WPI. Broadly speaking, her research looks at the interplay of gender, politics, and culture in modern France. Her first book, Engendering Frenchness, explores the interconnectivity of voting, gender, and popular culture, demonstrating how a conservative cultural vision of women’s role in society dominated the years immediately after women won the right to vote and ultimately dampening the potential political solidarity they might have achieved.
In her second book, Charm Offensive, Professor Colvin examines how white French women became the world’s gold standard in terms of beauty, fashion, and body. She traces this idealization back to a French government program to put air hostesses on every Air France flight in the hopes of drawing more tourist money to the nation. These hostesses had to conform to very strict regulations in terms of their appearance and behavior. The program was a smashing success, leading the government to place hostesses not just on planes, but into every diplomatic and cultural milieu they possibly could, calling them ‘feminine ambassadors.’ Ultimately, a senior government official called for all women of France to act as diplomats of femininity at all times, in order to bolster the reputation of France as place of romance, beauty, and sensuality.
Professor Colvin’s third book project deals with food culture in France in the 1970s and 1980s. The project examines how, in a nation like France, where food is so important to conceptualizations of national identity, discussions about the culinary landscape take on heightened importance. Thus debates about food are ultimately debates about issues like the shifting role of women in society, the relationship between citizens’ bodies and national health, anxieties about immigration and integration, and fears of Americanization.