RESEARCH INTERESTS

Slavery and emancipation; the early modern and modern Caribbean; the Atlantic World and early Americas; France and Francophone colonies; histories of gender and sexuality; and histories of race and racial politics.

PUBLICATIONS

“‘She Made Her Belly Disappear’: A Microhistory of Slavery and Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century Martinique,” Critical Historical Studies Vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 2025): 23-49.” 

“‘They Are Free with Me:’ Enslaved and Freed Women’s Anti-Slavery Lawsuits in the French Antilles, 1830-1848,” French Historical Studies Vol. 47, no. 3 (August 2024): 365-97.  

RECENT AWARDS

• 2026: Society for French Historical Studies, William Koren Jr. Prize for “most outstanding article on any period of French history published the previous year by a scholar appointed at a college or university in the United States or Canada.” 
• 2024: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Short-Term Research Fellowship
• 2023: John Carter Brown Library Short-Term Research Fellowship
• 2022-2023: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture NEH-Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

BIOGRAPHY

Deirdre Lyons (she/her) is an Assistant Instructional Professor of History in MAPSS. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago, an MA in History and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a BA in History from New York University. She has held postdoctoral and research fellowships from, among other institutions, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, the John Carter Brown Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and a Fulbright U.S. Student fellowship.  

Dr. Lyons' research focuses on the history of gender, slavery, and emancipation in the nineteenth-century French Caribbean. Her book project, Slavery, Emancipation, and Family Politics in the Nineteenth-Century French Antilles (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press), draws on years of archival research in France, Martinique, and Guadeloupe to examine how enslaved and freed women drew on kinship politics to claim freedom, while shedding new light on how French reformers, colonial authorities, and planters tried to remake a post-slavery society by disciplining the family lives of the laboring populations. At its core, Dr. Lyons' research illuminates how the enslaved family became a site of contestation over freedom’s limits before and after slavery in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Her work also illuminates how enslaved and freed women created cultural and social familial institutions in bondage and in freedom that served as survival strategies, a means of establishing autonomy, and as spaces from which they could counteract exploitation.

Her most recent article, “‘She Made Her Belly Disappear’: A Microhistory of Slavery and Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century Martinique,” Critical Historical Studies Vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 2025): 23-49,” won the Society for French Historical Studies’ 2026 William Koren Jr. Prize for “most outstanding article on any period of French history published the previous year by a scholar appointed at a college or university in the United States or Canada.” 

Her 2024 article, “‘They Are Free with Me’ Enslaved and Freed Women’s Antislavery Lawsuits in the French Antilles, 1830-1848,” French Historical Studies Vol. 47, No. 3 (August 2024), won honorable mentions for both the 2025 Koren Prize and the 2025 French Colonial Historical Society’s Article Prize.

In addition to her research, Dr. Lyons has served as the Assistant Reviews Editor for the Journal of African History and as Tech Officer for the French Colonial Historical Society. She is also a manuscript and book reviewer for several journals covering slavery and abolition, the history of the Caribbean, the French empire, and the vast early Americas.  She has engaged in several public-facing history projects, including co-curating a special exhibition at the Haitian American Museum of Chicago and consulting on policy research for anti-human trafficking NGO’s. She is also a co-organizer of the faculty-graduate student “Gender Transgressions” reading group at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.