Noah Pinkham

Noah Pinkham is a historian of France and its colonial empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their research examines the relationships between masculinity, institutions, and colonial power. Drawing on tools from social history, cultural history, gender history, and the history of sexuality, they explore how the fraternal relations cultivated in masculine institutions upheld—and sometimes challenged—empire. 

Their current book project, Imperial Brothers: Freemasonry and Fraternity in the French Colonial Empire, 1738-1870, investigates how freemasons regulated one another’s minds, bodies, and sexualities in response to perceived colonial threats like moral degeneration and miscegenation, offering a window into the operation of colonial power beyond the explicit purview of the state. At the same time, encounters with racial and sexual “others” forced masons to confront the contradictions between their philosophy of universal fraternity and colonial regimes of difference. As freemasons abandoned their racially exclusive admissions practices and began to recruit France’s colonial subjects in hopes of assimilating them to French values, they elaborated a putatively inclusive vision of fraternity that would help give rise to the ideologies of the so-called “Republican Empire” of France’s Third Republic (1870-1940).

Their second project, Men in Heat: Masculinity and Military Discipline Before Tropical Medicine, will turn to the military, another institution deeply implicated in colonial masculinity.  Men in Heat will explore how theories of climate informed military discipline and masculine subjectivity in the colonies before the advent of tropical medicine in the late nineteenth century.