Danna Agmon is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech. She is a historian of French empire, specializing in the history of French colonialism in India from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Her first book, titled A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India, is both a global history and a local history. A Colonial Affair, published in September 2017 by Cornell University Press, offers a comprehensive analysis of the competing French projects of trade and religion in the Indian Ocean at the turn of the eighteenth century. At the same time, it reveals how the life of one man—Nayiniyappa, the most senior Indian employee in the French colony of Pondicherry—was tragically upended by his enmeshment in the imperial project. She is currently working on a book titled Crime in the Colonial City: Law and French Empire in the India, which charts how different modes of resolving disputes were enacted and transformed in French colonial courts. Research for this project has been supported by a Social Science Research Council Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.
Danna Agmon
