After decades of historians either ignoring or romanticizing the French colonies, Stovall played a crucial role in the “colonial turn” in French history, an explosion of critical empire studies. Stovall contrasts how Paris welcomed generations of Black Americans with how migrants from French colonies in Africa were (and continue to be) subject to various forms of prejudice, repression, and violence. The lively and entertaining narrative recounts how Black American soldiers in the First World War discovered a white world free of Jim Crow. His best-known work is Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). While trained in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a social historian of white industrial workers, Stovall pioneered the history of nonwhite people in France. Arguing that history could not exist within the framework of the nation-state, he placed France in a world historical context. Stovall was one of the first historians to engage in a critical analysis of race in France, challenging the self-congratulatory French myth that racism was an Anglo-Saxon problem. Despite his administrative duties, Stovall remained a prolific historian and a passionate teacher. In 2020, he became dean of graduate studies at Fordham University. Stovall returned to Santa Cruz as dean of humanities from 2015 to 2020.
From 2001 to 2015, he served on the Berkeley faculty, entering administration in 2006. He held a Berkeley postdoc from 1984 to 1986 and then was a professor at Santa Cruz from 1988 to 2001. He spent most of his career in the University of California system. On December 10, 2021, Tyler Stovall suddenly and unexpectedly passed away in New York City.
Photo courtesy Carolyn Lagattuta, University of California, Santa Cruz
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