Alice Laburthe joined the Cushwa Center in summer 2026 as a research fellow. A historian of U.S. and French imperialism specializing in the intersection of gender and settler colonialism, she pursued her doctoral studies at Northwestern University, where she received a T.H. Breen Fellowship and the Henry Binford Teaching Prize. Laburthe earned a B.A. and an M.A. in history from the University of Toulouse II as well as a B.A. in social sciences from the University of Paris V.
In July, Melissa Coles corresponded with Laburthe about her graduate experience, her work, and the year ahead.
Melissa Coles: Welcome to the Cushwa Center and Notre Dame! You’re coming from Northwestern University. Tell us about your time there.
Alice Laburthe: My time at Northwestern has been incredibly transformative. It was my first time enrolled at a U.S. educational institution, and while having to adapt quickly to a new academic environment in a different language has come with a few challenges, I have been surrounded by welcoming scholars who have made the graduate experience stimulating and rewarding through fascinating seminars and productive and generous feedback. When I think about my time at Northwestern, I also think about how much I enjoyed my work as a teaching assistant, the lively discussions I had with students, and the cooperative relationships I built while teaching with faculty. Overall, people and opportunities at Northwestern have given me valuable tools for navigating academic work—from research to teaching to publishing to entering the job market—with candor and attentiveness.
MC: Tell us more about your dissertation. How did you decide on the topic?
AL: My dissertation traces and compares Native peoples’ and settler colonial governments’ responses to the Catholic schooling of Native and mixed-descent women in the 19th-century U.S. Midwest and Algeria. I historicize and interrogate the role of Indigenous women and gender in early settler colonies striving to establish European control over Native peoples and property.
The idea for this project came relatively late. During my earlier studies in France, I had researched how friendships facilitated gender performance and enabled gender subversion in late-18th- and 19th-century France. Studying women’s friendships entailed studying education because friendships were both educational tools that parents encouraged and relationships formed within educational institutions.
When I began my graduate studies, I was expecting that because of how much more widespread women’s education was in the 19th-century United States, I would conduct a similar project and write a comparative dissertation. And so, I undertook the study of American history. But through seminars and readings, I was increasingly interested in settler colonialism and Indigenous histories—and how they debunked what I had previously known about North America. In parallel, continuing to study European history brought new conversations on the French colonization of Algeria to my attention.
As I realized the widespread presence of French-founded Catholic orders dispensing educational services in the U.S. and Algeria, and because I had already studied the history of gender and women’s education, Catholic women’s teaching work among Native communities appeared as a relevant bridge to study settler colonialism and to compare Algeria and the U.S. While learning appropriate gender behaviors was integral to the education of European-descended women, I was surprised by how dedicated missionaries were to instilling the Euro-American gender binary in Native women. I was interested in exploring whether, how, and why each colonial state relied on religious orders to fulfill their agenda of controlling Native lands and peoples, and so I studied the role of Native women and gender systems in early settler colonies.
MC: Your dissertation carries out that comparative study of Indigenous girls and women, French Catholic sisters, and education in the U.S. and Algeria. What does this comparative angle reveal that a single-site study would obscure?
AL: My dissertation starts with the women who entered religious orders in large numbers in 19th-century France as part of a Catholic revival during the Bourbon Restoration and as a response to the strictures imposed on women by the new Civil Code. Among these religious women, some searched for remote regions to actualize a religious revival, and they allied their missionary ambitions with state ambitions in disputed territories. Some nuns went to North America to educate and convert Natives and European-descended youth; they hoped to benefit from the enduring presence of the French-Indigenous fur-trading communities already familiar with Catholic missionaries in what was formerly a French domain. Across the Atlantic, an unexpected 1830 war with Ottoman Algeria promised to revive France’s international prestige after the loss of its North American empire. The French conquering forces invited religious women to join in and to provide services to the military and settlers and, to a lesser extent, Indigenous communities.
Once in the Midwest and in Algeria, however, the nuns dealt with two distinct settler regimes, which, in spite of the similarities of their goals, employed different methods to make those goals come to fruition. The comparative angle highlights those differences; comparing two vastly dissimilar regions brings nuance to some generalizations about settler colonialism as a systematic and total force of elimination, and the comparative lens offers new interpretations. For example, while I am greatly indebted to scholars who have written about colonial schools and missions as tools to subjugate Indigenous populations, schools could also implement this project very imperfectly or could be instrumentalized by Native peoples to secure cultural continuity and group survival. This is one of the arguments that my dissertation makes.
Comparing the U.S. with Algeria emphasizes how varied colonial officials’ views on the role of Native women for the future of the colonies were. In Algeria, contrary to the United States, even when colonial ambitions were similar, the colonial government was ambivalent about educating Native women and about assimilating them into European society. Nuns still managed to educate Indigenous girls, but they faced many obstacles and often had to discontinue their activities. My work argues that religious and secular colonizers did not uniformly prioritize Indigenous women’s acculturation across settler colonial regimes and across time. The comparative angle unveils the contingencies and precariousness of settler colonial projects and trajectories.
Finally, comparing Algeria with the U.S. is interesting because the former successfully ousted colonial oppressors whereas the latter remains a settler colony. Yet, even in the U.S., Native communities’ historical and contemporary vitality points to their generational work resisting the settler colonial project that sought to erase them. By the same token, comparing localized responses to the establishment and management of Catholic schools has brought to the fore how forceful and adaptive Native resilience was in both regions, which further indicates the unsteadiness of colonial regimes, past and present. The Catholic school, it turns out, was used by diverse Native groups as part of their strategies to attenuate the impacts of colonization.
MC: Your research into other groups—such as the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet—will be part of a dissertation-to-manuscript project. As currently conceptualized, what is the scope of this larger project?
AL: My focus in the United States has been on the Potawatomi people and the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, and I have drawn conclusions regarding Native resilience and adaptability, Indian policy, and Catholics’ and Office of Indian Affairs employees’ attitudes toward Native people and the possibility of their assimilation into Euro-American society. Stretching historian Richard White’s idea of a middle ground as a place of accommodation between Natives and European colonists in the 17th- and 18th-century Great Lakes, my dissertation demonstrates that there was still a middle ground of accommodation between secular and religious colonizers and Indigenous people in the Lower Midwest in the mid-to-late 19th century, and this middle ground took the form of the Catholic classroom. Great Lakes tribes’ skills were transported by the removed Potawatomi to enable them to survive under new circumstances. Moreover, government employees were generally very supportive of the missionaries’ work. But the archives of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet reveal a very different story.
The French Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet arrived in North America in the 1830s with hopes to educate Indigenous communities. As I plan to turn my dissertation into a manuscript, I anticipate writing an additional chapter that will begin when the Sisters of St. Joseph undertook educational work among the Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe, and Menominee peoples in the late-19th-century western Great Lakes region. While the sisters generally still had the backing of Native groups, the support of Washington and local Indian agents was much less reliable, and relations between those groups of colonizers were tense. This chapter will complement my goal of demonstrating the variability of settler colonial projects and trajectories and of differentiating between groups of colonizers. Similarly, I expect the manuscript to include a new chapter that will expand my current chronological and geographical focus in Algeria.
MC: What led you to apply for (and eventually accept) this fellowship with the Cushwa Center?
AL: The Cushwa Center appeared as the perfect fit from the beginning. For several years, I had been interested in and appreciative of the center’s emphasis on Catholic women, notably through the triennial Conference on the History of Women Religious and the research support offered to scholars. I had myself benefited from a Mother Theodore Guerin Research Travel Grant to do archival work on the French nuns featured in my dissertation. In addition, the Cushwa Center’s focus on American Catholicism yet openness to global connections and influences led me to think that I could bring insights and benefit from the conversations generated by the center’s events—both because of the comparative angle of my work and because the Catholic women I study were agents within global networks. Finally, when I interviewed for the position, and upon speaking with the then-co-directors and associate director, I was impressed with the resources that the center provides for junior scholars, and I was very pleased with the possibility to actively participate in the programming of future events. Postdoctoral research fellows are given every opportunity to thrive during their time at Notre Dame and to get a strong foothold within academia from which to later pursue their careers. This is why I accepted the position.
MC: What are you looking forward to in the year ahead?
AL: I am thrilled to be a part of the Cushwa Center! I am looking forward to working closely with my new colleagues, attending the center’s events, and meeting scholars, especially those from the history and American studies departments. I also look forward to pursuing my own research. Finally, I am excited to live in South Bend; having spent the past seven years in Chicago, I have become very attached to the region for cultural, historical, and environmental reasons, and I am glad I am not going too far. I just love colorful falls and icy winters.
Melissa Coles is a lecturer in the Department of History at Georgia Southern University. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the Cushwa Center from 2024 to 2026.
Two other postdoctoral fellows also joined the Cushwa Center in summer 2026. Read our conversations with them:
Christian pluralism and the making of modern American politics: Five questions with Austin Clements
French Catholic thought across borders: Five questions with Jacob Saliba