Last spring, Ph.D. Candidate Phoebe Labat received a Fulbright Award for France 2023-2024. Since her arrival in October, she has been working on a dissertation around natural disasters in the French Atlantic world. In this spotlight, Phoebe offers an update on her research, travels, and what she's looking forward to for the remainder of her Fulbright experience:
"The Fulbright Award has given me the time and resources to immerse myself in the archives and in the beautiful city of Aix-en-Provence. Working with documents housed in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, I have collected over a hundred letters and reports, so far, from French overseas colonies that detail experiences of natural disasters in the Americas. I have found it fascinating how people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had similar anxieties and reactions to disasters as those in the present. Enslaved people, Indigenous people, and colonists worried about food, security, property, and God.
While I do spend a lot of time trying to make sense of illegible handwriting and eighteenth-century French trade laws, I have also had opportunities to explore Provence—visiting Nîmes, Pont du Gard, Avignon, and Les Baux-de-Provence. Trips to Paris have kept me in touch with fellow Fulbrighters and in November we celebrated the 75th anniversary of Fulbright France at Hôtel de Pontalba, the residence of the American Ambassador to France.
In the next few months, I will be taking weekend trips to Strasbourg, Le Mont-Saint Michel, Chamonix, and Bordeaux before departing for French overseas departments in the Caribbean, where I will investigate the environments and archives of Martinique and Guadeloupe."